THE U.S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE
R EE T II R EE D
PPaacciiffiicc RReeggiioonn
Check out the Fish & Wildlife Service Retirees Website: www .nctc.fws.gov/history/heritagecommittee.html
ORAL HISTORY
of
David B. Marshall
Portland, Oregon
November 30, 2000
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID B. MARSHALL
BY JERRY C. GROVER
and Judy M. Grover
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Retired
PORTLAND, OREGON
MR. GROVER: I am with David B. Marshall, a long time
employee of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Can you give us
a little of your background and history? When were you born?
MR. MARSHALL: I was born on March 7, 1926 in Portland,
Oregon into a pioneer Oregon family, at least on my father’s
side and to some extent on my mother’s side. I had an early
interest in birds; no doubt through my family. My family was
composed of a number of naturalists including my great
grandmother who was a close friend of William L. Finley, the
famous Oregon conservationist, wildlife photographer, writer
and naturalist. So I developed an interest in birds. Some of my
earliest memories are identifying birds in the backyard at the
feeder. I learned their names from my mother and father. My
father and his family were very active in what was then called
the Oregon Audubon Society, now Audubon Society of
Portland. As a result of exposure to activities and members of
this group, I had further exposure to things in the natural history
world. My parents were particularly interested in wildflowers.
But that didn’t interest me at the time. It was just birds.
MR. GROVER: What did your father do?
MR. MARSHALL: My father was a Civil Engineer and a
Surveyor. He and his brother had an engineering firm here in
Portland and did a good part of the lot survey work and
subdivision work in Portland, starting in the teens up until the
mid 1950s. Also they conducted engineering work during
World War II designing the docks at the shipyards and laying
out housing projects. During the depression my dad was County
Surveyor for a short time when business slacked off. This was
an elected position. I also had the opportunity to get in the out
of doors on numerous family outings and camping trips.
Camping wasn’t popular then, but we did a lot of it over
various parts of the state.
MR. GROVER: That would have been in the 1930s?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, the 1930s and early 1940s. We really
got around, particularly in southeast Oregon including Steens
Mountain. Then it was tough getting around. Many a time we
were delayed for a day or two because storm flooded the roads.
Those family trips meant a lot. Then there was the exposure to
things like the Audubon Society lectures, which were weekly.
My dad was the chairman of the programs.
MR. GROVER: Was this the Oregon Audubon Society?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, it was then called the Oregon
Audubon Society. It was the only one in the state. There were
the Christmas bird counts, which were important to me.
Audubon activities brought me into contact with William L.
Finley and Stanley G. Jewett and a number of other famous
people like Ed Averill. So I had this contact as a boy,
particularly with Finley and Jewett, which meant a lot to me. I
was impressed with the things they were doing from a
conservation standpoint. I would overhear them talking over
conservation problems and their strategies and what they should
do about various issues. Finley and his wife, Irene, came to
some family Christmas celebrations. I got to listen to Finley’s
lectures. One that I can most vividly remember was on the
California condor. That inspired me in terms of the need to
protect endangered species. Another event that got me
interested in endangered species was this; in 1937 we were at
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Borax Lake east of Steens Mountain, OR. We looked down at
the fish in the lake and my father told me, “That fish does not
have a name, and this is the only place that it is found in the
world”. Somehow, that really got to me. I picked up a lot of
interest then. This fish didn’t have a name and this was the only
place in the world where it was found. The only way my father
knew about that was through his association with Carl Hubbs.
MR. GROVER: Was that Carl Hubbs of Hubbs and Lagler
fame?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes! Hubbs had told him about it. He told
him that the fish hadn’t been described at that point.
Incidentally, the fish did not get described until the late 1960s or
early 1970s and is now referred to as the Borax Lake chub. I
made sure it got listed under the ESA when I was with that
program. So, I had an association with natural history in
boyhood. Then I met two boys, Tom McAllister and William
Telfer, who were about my age. We became close friends. I
had a bicycle and saw to it that they got bicycles and we
bicycled all over the Portland area on bird watching trips. And
we contributed to work that was done to document birds of the
Portland area, what seasons they were there and where. We
contributed a lot to that. Our adventures just came out in print
in Wild in the City by Houck and Cody published by Oregon
Historical Society Press. In it is a story titled “Home Town”
which Tom McAllister and I wrote. The story was also
published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in the Fall 2000
issue. That tells a little bit about our adventures. We rode our
bikes to Mount Hood. At one point we even bicycled to Olallie
Lake, OR. This was in the early 1940s. We also bicycled out
towards Maupin about 100 miles from home to see birds of
eastern Oregon. These were bicycle/camping trips. At that time
you could bicycle from here to Government Camp and you’d
have to get off of the road maybe every fifteen or twenty
minutes to let a car by; nothing like the traffic of today. The
pavement wasn’t really wide enough to accommodate a car and
a bicycle too. These experiences gave us a lot of self confidence
and independence.
MR. GROVER: Did you have any jobs at this time? I know it
takes a little money to go out to Olallie Lake. Did you ever
work for pay?
MR. MARSHALL: No, I didn’t until I was 16. Well, I had a
family allowance if I cut the lawn and did little chores like that.
But I remember that to get my bicycle, I had to pay half of it. If
I could save up enough money for half of it, my father would
pay for the other half. These bicycle trips added a lot to my life.
In 1939, when I was 13 years old, Oregon Audubon conducted a
week’s auto trip to Malheur Refuge. My dad’s brother, C. L.
Marshall, set up the logistics for it. But the real leader from a
technical standpoint was Stanley G. Jewett, who was called the
Regional Biologist for what was then the U.S. Biological
Survey. Jewett was co-author with Ira Gabrielson of Birds of
Oregon, which was published in 1940. Jewett took quite an
interest in me as a boy. He would go over our bird notes from
our various trips. We would call him with questions about
birds. We didn’t really have good field guides then. He would
usually say, “You come down to my office.” We’d do down
there and we’d discuss things that we had seen. But the trip to
Malheur really told me that I wanted to be like Jewett, a wildlife
biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was kind of
headed that way. He advised Tom McAllister and me to get
summer jobs outdoors just as soon as we could even if it was
building trails; this would help lead to careers. When we were
still in our last year of high school the Forest Service recruited
youth for fire control and work crews as well as forest fire
lookouts. Physically fit older young men were in the military.
This was in 1943. Tom McAllister and I both applied and we
got put on the Fremont National Forest. About July 1, at the
beginning of the fire season, both of us were put on fire lookout
stations on peaks. We were seventeen years old. At that point
there were no tourists, and no pleasure travel because of the war.
There was gas rationing. We were put up there alone with no
contact with the outside world except by telephone connected to
the nearest ranger station. Tom was put on Hager Mountain
near Silver Lake and I was on one called Colman Point near
Bly. We kept bird notes of course and that led to an article in
The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union,
titled “Summer Birds of the Fremont National Forest, Oregon.”
We thus published in a professional journal before we’d ever
gone to college. Jewett encouraged us to do this and went over
it before we sent it in. He said that it was fine. It was published
in the April 1945 edition.
In 1944, after high school graduation, the war wasn’t over. I
went into the army air forces. I became an aerial gunner on a B-
17. My position was as the “belly” gunner otherwise known as
the ball turret. I flew four combat missions over Germany and
the war in Europe ended. Then in 1946, I was out of the
military and entered Oregon State College where I majored in
what was then called Fish and Game Management. Tom
McAllister did likewise. We were right away pegged as being
‘different’ because the class, which was all war veterans but
one, and all men of course, enrolled in the major because of an
interest in hunting and fishing. We were the first post-war class
at Oregon State in Fish and Game Management. Tom and I
picked Oregon State because it was one of only two or three
schools that offered a major in that field on the west coast. It
was a really good curriculum. We turned out to be well
prepared for professional positions, even though not one of our
major instructors had a Ph.D. They really worked hard on a
curriculum that would fit what was needed for us. Some of the
classes such as ornithology and mammalogy, I see most people
taking now as graduate students. The agencies at that point
badly needed trained people. It was a case of just getting them
out just as fast as they could. We really weren’t encouraged to
go to graduate school at all.
The summer after I got out of the military, I worked again for
the Forest Service on the Fremont National Forest as a fire
lookout. The summer between my freshman and sophomore
year at OSU I did likewise. Between my sophomore and junior
year, I worked for the National Park Service at Crater Lake
National Park. I wanted to vary my experience, but I was
simply one of those rangers at the gate who pulled in the fees. I
wanted to be a ranger/naturalist, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
They said I didn’t have enough college yet. But I ended up on
the side helping Don Farner, who wrote The Birds of Crater
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Lake National Park. I wanted to get into the FWS and saw that
I had better head that way. So in about January of 1949 I went
to see Stan Jewett and asked him, “How do I get in to the
FWS”? It was the usual answer, “You come down to my
office”. That was when I was junior at Oregon State. He told
me I should apply for a Student Assistant position and
introduced me to Kenneth F. MacDonald (known as “Mac”),
the regional refuge supervisor (The Portland Regional Office at
that time had the states of WA, OR, CA, ID, NV and MT
assigned to it). They had Student Assistant positions at the Tule
Lake and Malheur Refuges and were going to establish one on
the Stillwater Wildlife Management Area. So I applied and
nothing happened. So I called Jewett again and said, “What do I
do?” He said, “You come down to my office.” I went down
there and he marched me back to see Kenneth McDonald again.
Jewett, I found out, wasn’t too well liked by some of his peers
because of his bluntness. He said, “Mac, do you have this boy a
job or don’t you have a job for him?” Mac kind of chewed
away on his cigar, and grumbled like he did. Finally he said he
did have a job for me. Then Jewett, who was not with refuges
but served as the flyway biologist at that point, told Mac that he
wanted him to put me at Stillwater. Of course, that didn’t set to
good with Mac either.
MR. GROVER: Who was Mac again?
MR. MARSHALL: Mac was the Refuge Supervisor in
Portland. He was a Scotsman who had no biological training
whatsoever. He came to the service from Montana where he
had been in charge of state hatcheries, but he had no formal
training in fish and wildlife. But in many ways he was a good
administrator. Anyway, this was all kind of innocent on my
part. It was all because of who I knew that I got into the FWS.
There was no good formal review of applicants or advertising. I
don’t think it was proper, but that’s what happened. I wanted to
know how I could get in, and Jewett told me to come down to
his office! He was determined that I go to Stillwater. He said it
was a new area. He told Mac that we had virtually no
information on it - no real idea of what the bird or plant life
there. Jewett told Mac, “This is the man who can do it!” This
probably happened in April. In June upon termination of spring
term, I drove to Fallon, Nevada, the headquarters of the
Stillwater Wildlife Management Area, and met Tom Horn, the
Refuge Manager, at his home on an afternoon in early June of
1949. He had arrived on the site with his family several weeks
previously. I believe there might have been one maintenance
man. I drove down there in a surplus World War II jeep that I
had. Tom Horn must have taken a liking to me because I just
talked to him for an hour or two, and he said, “Well, do you see
that jeep over there?” It was a new jeep pickup truck. He said,
“That’s yours for the summer. I want you to inventory
everything that’s here. All the bird and mammal life, plants and
so forth.”
I became very fond of Tom’s family. In fact, I wasn’t there but
for an hour or two when he sent me with his daughter, Nancy,
who was about eight and knew the way to the refuge. She
guided me out there and showed me a piece of it and we came
back to town. The summer turned into a great experience
because I was given a free hand and wrote a report on the area at
the end of the summer. I still have a copy of that report.
During the course of the summer, J. Clark Salyer showed up
with Mac. Salyer was national Chief of the Wildlife Refuge
System. He was an extremely colorful and competent character.
Salyer came to determine what part of this refuge was going to
left open to public hunting. It was a 205,000-acre area of which
we had jurisdiction over about 155,000 acres through an
agreement with the Nevada Fish and Game Commission, the
Truckee-Carson Irrigation District and the FWS. Most of it was
to become open to public hunting. Salyer came to talk to the
local people about what part of the area would be open to public
hunting and what wouldn’t. This is a really interesting piece of
history. He and Mac went on a tour of the refuge with Tom
Horn. They borrowed my jeep pickup that day. It was the only
vehicle with 4-wheel drive, which was essential. There were
almost no roads. Mac was a very fastidious man who didn’t like
a bit of dust or dirt. In the front of the pickup there was just
room for Tom Horn and Salyer. I didn’t get to go because there
wasn’t enough room. But Mac had to sit on a box in the back of
the pickup in all of the dust. Of course, Salyer outranked him
and Tom Horn had to drive! Besides, Salyer delighted in
teasing Mac about his not wanting to get dirty. They had a
meeting that night with the local sportsmen. Salyer drew a line
across the map. He said, “Okay boys, which side do you want?”
This was in reference to which side of the line they wanted for
hunting and which side did they wanted to be closed to hunting.
They were furious because they had been sold on the idea that
they could break it all up into little units and have a little piece
here and a little piece there for refuge and so forth. That didn’t
go over at all. But the map they had of the refuge didn’t have
half of the wetlands delineated at the north end of the area.
There was no good map. I discovered all kinds of marvelous
habitat that wasn’t on the map at all. In fact the map showed
about a third of the wetlands on the area. The local sportsmen
could see that. When Salyer drew that line which looked like an
even split to him, they naturally picked the good half, which had
all of these marvelous wetlands for waterfowl habitat that were
not on the map.
MR. GROVER: They wanted this part as their hunting area?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, it was to be the hunting area. So they
came out way, way ahead in terms of the hunting area. That
was an interesting experience in how things came about at that
time. But that’s also how I got to come into the service on a
permanent basis. Before that meeting, and after Salyer’s tour of
the area, I walked into the office. It was around 5:30 in the
evening. I came to town for some reason, probably to pick up
the jeep truck. Tom Horn was in the office along with Salyer.
Salyer was standing there in his under shorts. He was changing
his clothes for the meeting. Tom said, “Dave, meet J. Clark
Salyer”! Well I shook hands with Salyer standing there in his
under shorts! Then, Salyer said…he had kind of a funny way of
talking: “How about coming to work for us permanently?”
What brought that on I have no idea. Tom insisted he did not
say anything about me. But I still wonder! But that’s what he
said. I told him, “Yes, I’d like to”. He then said, “Okay, do you
have a girlfriend?” I told him that I did and we were planning
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on getting married at the end of the summer. Salyer told me to
get Tom to give me three days of leave to go up to Oregon, get
my girlfriend, marry her and bring her back here. He said, “I
want to see what she thinks of this place”. At that time I later
learned, they were very concerned that employees be married
because they were in isolated places and unmarried men didn’t
seem to stay in one place or work long hours, as was customary
then. So in August, I did go home for several days. Betty and I
got married and we drove back down there. We stayed at the
Canvasback Gun Club where I was housed. That took care of
that necessary requirement I guess, in Salyer’s eyes. But like I
said, I guess he really did want to see what Betty thought of the
place because Fallon, Nevada was a pretty isolated area for a lot
of women, I can assure you. So I was back at Stillwater as an
Assistant Refuge Manager beginning in March of 1950 after I
completed the necessary requirements for my B.S. degree from
Oregon State College.
MR. GROVER: So Dave, this was in a permanent position?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, this was my first permanent
assignment.
MR. GROVER: So you arrived back there with a wife and….
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and a pregnant wife at that, by then!
But as soon as I had enough credits at Oregon State, which was
in March, I just left. The last courses in the last term didn’t look
too interesting to me. One of them was in big game
management and I wasn’t too interested in that particularly. So
we moved down there in March. The paper said I was Assistant
Refuge Manager, GS-5. But there was also a biologist assigned
there at that time. Tom Horn was not too crazy about him and
he wanted me to be the biologist, so he put the fellow that was
the biologist who had quite a bit of experience, on
administrative duties and I was really the biologist. I felt bad
about that. He was LeRoy Giles. He was really a very
competent guy. We got along great despite what Tom did.
I’d like to back up to one point.
MR. MARSHALL: MacDonald was Supervisor of Refuges in
Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana.
And he had one Assistant who was good at administrative work.
He name was Wilfred Anderson. He went from being a clerk at
Malheur to being an assistant to MacDonald. The Regional
office staff was two people, plus secretarial help. That’s all
there was. And MacDonald was supervisor then for the Refuge
Managers in those various states. You can see how many
people he had to supervise. You can also see what freedom they
must have had because Mac couldn’t watch over them that
closely.
MR. GROVER: Do you recollect how many refuges there
were, staffed refuges, in this area?
MR. MARSHALL: Well, I would judge about 30 that were
manned plus satellites.
MR. GROVER: How were they typically manned?
MR. MARSHALL: Typically, they were manned by a Refuge
Manager. On the big ones, also by an Assistant Refuge
Manager and several maintenance men and a clerk. That was
the typical staffing. Some of them only had one man on them.
Some of them had two. The big ones like Malheur would have
maybe ten. They were mostly maintenance people.
MR. GROVER: Okay, back to Stillwater. Here you are with a
pregnant wife back at Stillwater. What was your first
assignment there as a permanent employee, living the good life
as a GS-5?
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, my salary was $3,200.00 a year!
That was gross! But my rent was only $40.00 a month. One of
the things they wanted me to do was to work up a grazing plan
for the refuge. The understanding was that with the FWS taking
this over we would regulate the grazing and the money from the
grazing would go to the Truckee Carson Irrigation District. As
it was, there were a dozen or so cattle operators who were
getting free grazing on 155,000 acres. They weren’t paying a
dime for it and of course they were pretty bitter that suddenly
they were going to have to be charged for their grazing. In fact,
the Pelican Island area of the refuge had about a hundred horses
on it, loose. Nobody claimed them of course until they were
impounded. We had a real PR problem. I remember one of my
interesting experiences was going out towards the Pelican Island
area on a very sandy road, which required everything my truck
had. The sand had clay put on it that was just wide enough for a
vehicle to get over the sand dunes. I got about half way down
this a one-way road and met a rancher named Francis Erb
coming the other way. I was blocked from going anywhere. I
had to spend about two hours there with him being lectured on
the ills of the government and how terrible the government was
and how we had no right to come in there and charge him
grazing fees. So I began to get the flavor of the ranchers at that
point, as a very young person. Eventually we did get a grazing
plan but it took a long, long time to bring those people around to
the idea that they would have to pay, get their cattle counted and
so forth.
I continued with waterfowl inventory work on the weekly
censuses we were required to do then. Then, we started making
periodic trips to Anaho Island Refuge in Pyramid Lake to
inventory the pelican, tern and gull colonies there. I remember
my first trip out there; LeRoy Giles went along. I was very
nervous. We had to take off from Sutcliff to go to the island.
Pyramid Lake is very subject to high winds suddenly coming up
and creating high waves. We had a twelve-foot aluminum boat
with a ten-horse power motor. There was no spare motor. I
never felt very comfortable about it, if the motor went out or the
wind came up. I eventually found I could launch the boat from
a point on the mainland that was much closer to the island.
Anaho trips constituted great experiences. I did a lot of bird
photography out there. Giles and I ended up writing an article
on the birds of Anaho Island which was published in the Auk,
the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union.
The engineering people were very strong and had a lot of
influence at that time - more influence than biologists. They
wanted to build extensive systems of dikes and water control
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structures on refuges. Their big pitch was that they could make
these impoundments permanent water so ducks could have
water year round. What they did not understand, which I got to
understand so well, was that permanent water areas were not
good waterfowl habitat. It was seasonal water areas that were. I
had a very difficult time putting this across. It was so obvious at
Stillwater. Food plants grew in areas that were subject to
periodic drying. That was a reality… I was not popular for my
position on that at all! Mac and the Regional Director were very
influenced by the engineers; and did not put much stake in a
“youngster” like me. This was most unfortunate. It was a
frustrating thing to me.
MR. GROVER: Were the engineers here in Portland, or were
you using Reclamation engineers?
MR. MARSHALL: No, they were here in Portland. They
would come to the refuges periodically and all they could think
about was establishing permanent water. I’d write my reports
that said, no, this wasn’t going to work. Permanent water is the
poorest waterfowl habitat. That was a big thing with me; trying
to overcome that.
One of my most interesting assignments there was in the
anthropology field. There were Paiute Indians around, and a
Paiute Indian Reservation. An amateur archeologist/
anthropologist named Margaret Wheat lived in the area. She
realized that we had in the area an elderly Paiute Indian lady
named Wuzzie George who had lived in the Stillwater marsh in
her childhood under primitive, original conditions. Her father
and her parents wanted nothing to do with white people and they
lived out there under pre-Euro-American settlement conditions.
Wuzzie was a “gold mine” of information on how those people
lived. I was brought onto this scene by Margaret Wheat.
Wuzzie had a friend named Alice Steve who did live with white
people as a little girl. Alice was important in that she convinced
Wuzzie to tell us about how they lived. Wuzzie, through a
number of interviews that were taped, eventually spilled out
how she and her family lived and how they used the fisheries,
wildlife and plants of the marsh. We made fieldtrips out there
with her and went to her original home areas. It was real
revelation to me and one of the most exciting things in my life
because I realized that Wuzzie George knew far more about
plants and animals of the area than I did. She was a remarkable
woman and enjoyed watching birds. All of this was taped for
the Nevada State Museum. It was summarized and published by
the Univ. of Nevada Press under the title of Survival Arts of the
Primitive Paiutes by Margaret M. Wheat. Part of her work was
used later by anthropologists in the archeological surveys at
Stillwater, which they called me back for because of my
knowledge of Wuzzie George.
MR. GROVER: There was a book that was written a couple of
years ago which ended up on the market that the Stillwater
Refuge was a central part to. Did you have a part in developing
that?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, you are thinking of Catherine S.
Fowler’s book titled In the Shadow of Fox Peak, published in
1992 by the Service. Before its publication, the refuge had me
come down to discuss with Fowler my experiences with Wuzzie
George. It is an excellent book which, incidentally, contains a
number of my photographs. Other books resulting from this
work included People of the Marsh: A Cultural and Natural
History of Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge by Kendal Morris
and Anan W. Raymond or Who Were the Ancient People of
Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada? by Raymond and
Morris. Both were published by FWS. I did not contribute to
the writing of these books, but some of the photographs in them
were taken by me.
MR. MARSHALL: I was somewhat disappointed with
Margaret M. Wheat’s book. The publisher popularized it and
took out all of the scientific names of the plants, which was too
bad. One of my roles in this was to identify the plants the
Paiutes used. They would give their name and use for a plant
and I would give the Latin name so we’d be sure which plant we
were taking about. They took that out of the book. As far as I
know all of the tapes are in the Nevada State Museum. It was a
marvelous experience for me because I just couldn’t get over the
way those people lived and the knowledge they had of natural
history and even geology. It was just a great thing to learn
about. That was one of my most interesting of my life’s
assignments.
Another thing that went on, which I think was a terrible mistake
in some ways, was …the local people were very interested in
goose hunting. We had a population of Canada geese, which
was only about twenty-five or so birds. Salyer said that he’d
take care of that. He’d get some muskrats in there to build
houses. The local muskrat subspecies was a bank dweller.
They didn’t build houses. LeRoy Giles transplanted
approximately a thousand muskrats from the Tule Lake Refuge
to Stillwater. I think those muskrats originally came from the
Great Lakes. The Tule Lake muskrats reproduced like crazy
and built large houses all over the place, using the dense stands
of cattail and bulrush for material. And yes, we did build the
goose population way up. And in so doing, I suspect we
eliminated a subspecies of muskrat, which I assume is extinct.
This was the burrowing muskrat, which had been native to
central Nevada. Unless there is some isolated marsh in Nevada
that has some, I don’t know of it. The FWS eliminated a
muskrat taxon at that point. This did get Ray Alcorn, a local
mammalogist/ornitologist somewhat upset. That’s something
that has not been adequately documented or written up.
Backing up a little bit; I forgot to mention during my first
summer at Stillwater I was detailed to Tule Lake for about 10
days. They had hundreds of thousands of ducks die there from
botulism in 1949 on the adjoining Lower Klamath Refuge. I
was detailed there with Leroy Giles to work on that botulism
situation by picking sick ducks up and running them through a
hospital. They were given an antitoxin and fresh water. The
Refuge Manager at Tule Lake in 1949 was a man named
Howard Sergeant. Howard pulled me off the botulism detail
part of the time. I got to go around the Klamath Basin refuges
6
with him and observe. He seemed interested in teaching me all
he could about management of this large refuge complex.
Going back to my permanent assignment…let’s see, I
mentioned the Indians. Oh yeah, I wanted to mention that at the
best I can figure at this point, we had five refuge biologists in
the field on the refuges in the Region at that time. I can tell you
how many refuges there were if I look at the list and check those
off. But there were only five field biologists on the refuges
themselves that I can recall.
MR. GROVER: The definition of a field biologist was one with
a college degree?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and supposedly was doing biological
work rather than building fences or something like that.
MR. GROVER: Were the Refuge Managers and Assistant
Refuge Managers degreed people?
MR. MARSHALL: Generally not in the 1950s. I wanted to
mention that. I think I’ve got it written down for a little later in
my list of frustrations.
MR. GROVER: Okay, we can wait and get to it. Let’s go on to
your next career stage and transfer.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, my transfer to Sacramento NWR.
That was in November of 1953. At that time the State of
California’s Department of Fish and Game was very strong.
They were unhappy because no part of the 10,000 acre
Sacramento NWR was open to public hunting. They were
really putting pressure on for the FWS to open 40% of that
refuge to public hunting, which would have been a mistake
because it would have concentrated the birds even more in
closed areas. But J. Clark Salyer got the idea that maybe we
could find Ross’s geese there. Ross’s geese at that point were
considered very rare. If Ross’s geese were wintering there, then
there would be every reason not to open any of it to hunting. So
they sent me to Sacramento. I was the first full-time biologist
there. My first priority was of course to find Ross’s geese on
the Sacramento Refuge. I didn’t find them there!
MR. GROVER: What grade were you then?
MR. MARSHALL: I had become a GS-7 after my first year of
permanent employment at Stillwater. The Sacramento Refuge
Manager had no college training and he was very sensitive
about that. His name was Vernon Ekedahl. He was Montana
farmer who became a maintenance man and later Manager of
Bowdoin Refuge. He was a very competent farmer and
manager. But he felt very inadequate, especially around me. I
did convince him I was okay, I guess. I couldn’t tell him what
to do, but I could show him! I got along with Vernon fine, and
he left me alone on the Ross’s goose thing. That was way
beyond him. I couldn’t even get as much as a spotting scope out
of him, which I desperately needed to try and tell Ross’s geese
from snow geese in the field. This went on for months before I
finally got a spotting scope. Ray Erickson, Biologist for
Malheur, helped with this project. We managed to get a couple
of Ross’s geese that were winged by hunters. It was against
regulations to shoot Ross’s geese. But hunters couldn’t tell
them from snow geese. We put the crippled Ross’s geese in a
pen with crippled snow geese. In that way we figured out how
to separate them at a distance. I didn’t find any Ross geese on
the refuge, but I’d go around to the picking plants. The duck
hunters then would take their birds to processing plants that
would pick them. I would go around to the picking plants and
try and get an idea of how many Ross’s geese there were as
opposed to snow geese. Of course the picking plant operators
first thought I was law enforcement and was going to arrest
people for shooting Ross’s geese. I managed to convince them
that I wasn’t interested in that. I would find Ross’s geese at the
picking plants but I wouldn’t say anything. I started to get an
idea of how many there were, and then I befriended a big duck
club in the Butte Sink. They understood that I was okay. So I
began to get an idea of the number of Ross geese that were
taken. I didn’t find many initially. Eventually, I got into the
San Joaquin Valley and discovered that this is where most of
them wintered. I managed to figure out how to inventory them
there by air.
MR. GROVER: Was this on the Merced Refuge?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, Merced is in that general area; the
grasslands. It was partly the way they flew, and partly the way
they associated with cackling geese rather than other snow geese
that I managed to inventory them. Gene Kridler, who replaced
me, and I wrote all the Ross’s geese stuff up. I wanted to put it
in a scientific journal, but the Regional office grabbed a hold of
the report and they didn’t want it published. That made Gene
and me kind of bitter.
MR. GROVER: Why didn’t they want it published?
MR. MARSHALL: We were critical of some things that were
going on, as for example the meaningless closure on Ross’s
geese hunting. I think that’s part of the reason. Richard Griffith
was the one. He said he’d straighten it out, but he never did.
MR. GROVER: He was RD at the time?
MR. MARSHALL: He was Assistant RD for Wildlife. Rice
growing then was a big thing on those refuges. There were
three federal refuges; Sacramento, Colusa and Sutter. The
number of birds there was tremendous. There was also a State
area, Gray Lodge. I wish we could put this on the tape but these
pictures will give you an idea of the concentrations of waterfowl
that were involved at that time, which were confined to very
small areas that were closed to hunting. The reason we didn’t
want to see more areas opened to hunting was because they
were just packed in there in poultry pen-like conditions. Rice
was grown on the refuges by the FWS and Vernon Ekedahl was,
like I said, a great farmer. The birds completely consumed the
rice crops, but I was concerned that Vernon didn’t want to
recognize ducks as eating anything but rice. So I started a study
by going around to hunters and offering to clean their ducks if I
could have the crops and the gizzards. Eventually, I did get
quite an assemblage showing that the ducks were eating a lot of
things besides rice. Vernon would come by my desk and see the
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contents of the gizzards and then he began to get the picture that
it was important to grow some of the wild food plants too.
Since then, the refuges have quit growing rice, and there is more
refuge area now. When we did have the ducks concentrated like
that you had to have as big a volume of feed as you could
produce, and at that point in time it involved rice.
MR. GROVER: Where they using the statistic that about
seventy percent of the Pacific Flyway birds funneled through the
Sacramento Refuge?
MR. MARSHALL: The Sacramento Valley, but not all were
there at the same time; many went on to the San Joaquin Valley.
MR. GROVER: The Sacramento Valley had a sizable portion
of them. That was a hell of a lot of birds!
MR. MARSHALL: That’s right! It was seventy percent of ten
million or more birds! I know for a while there we were
completely underestimating how many birds there were. I did
surveys mostly by air with Ray Glahn, a pilot biologist with the
Service. He had a FWS plane at that time, a Piper Super Cub. I
found I was grossly underestimating waterfowl numbers. I
discovered this by taking pictures with my own camera, and
then sample counting the ducks and geese on the pictures.
California Fish and Game had at that point a two-engine
Beachcraft aircraft with a big mounted surplus aerial camera in
the plane’s belly. They started sampling by air during the
winter inventory and we really got a much better handle on what
the populations were.
MR. GROVER: Was your relationship with the State at that
time good? Were they sharing the pictures with you?
MR. MARSHALL: Our relationship in the biological field was
good. Our relationship at the administrative level was terrible.
It was frightfully bad. And that brings up a real good point in
that there was tremendous rivalry between the state and the feds
then, which was most unfortunate. Salyer was a part of that.
MacDonald was a part of that. It was things like; if you’re
looking at an area for a new refuge, well, don’t tell the state,
they might want it too. It was terrible and it irritated me
because there were so many things to be done that we could
work together on. John Chattin who was the flyway biologist
had a good relationship with California; he worked for them at
one time. In the biological field we had no problems and
assisted each other. But at the administrative level it was really
bad. And it wasn’t just California and Nevada, it was with other
states. It was uncalled for, and I blame a lot of our own people
for that.
Another aspect of this thing was refuge visitors. People like
Ekedahl just didn’t like the public coming on the refuge. He
discouraged any kind of public use. A number of Refuge
Managers were like that. They thought that people would
disturb the birds and we should just keep them out. I was
against that policy and wanted to bring people in. There were
groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club that
wanted to tour and observe birds on the refuge. The answer
from Ekedahl was a reluctant, ‘well, yeah, if you go along, you
can take them out there.’ I did some of that. Then we had a
meeting in Portland with all of the managers and biologists. J.
Clark Salyer was there. Salyer got up and made a speech about
that ‘you’ve got to open these areas to the public and let them
know what’s there. It’s the only way we’re going to have public
support’. Of course that was a great welcoming bit of words for
me. I was very happy over that.
MR. GROVER: You were separating the public visitor from the
hunter visitor?
MR. MARSHALL: The hunter visitor was okay on a hunting
area. But I’m talking about public visitors or hunters coming in
to see the birds in areas closed to hunting. Setting up a tour
route on a refuge just wasn’t done then. I wanted to, but most of
the old time managers were against it. Salyer helped change
that policy. I felt that the policy on refuge visitors needed to
change badly and it did get changed. Now in visiting the
Sacramento Refuge I take great pleasure in seeing a tour route
and visitor center.
Ekedahl would turn most important visitors over to me to
handle. This included Sir Peter Scott, Jean Delacour and Lady
Scott. Peter Scott and Delacour were two world known
waterfowl specialists, and Scott was also an artist. They came
to see Ross’ geese. I took them on a tour of the Grasslands in
the San Joaquin Valley, corresponded with Scott and wrote a
paper on the Pacific Flyway for the Wildfowl Trust’s
publication.
I never felt like I finished my work at Sacramento before the
transfer to Malheur came up, which I didn’t want to do. But
Ray Erickson was the biologist at Malheur. This was in 1955.
He was being transferred to the Washington Office. He was
bypassing the Regional Office and going straight to
Washington. He obviously picked me as his successor for
Malheur. John Scharff had a lot of faith in Ray. And Ray said
that I was the one. So I got transferred to Malheur.
MR. GROVER: Was this with a promotion?
MR. MARSHALL: I can’t remember. I knew you were going
to ask me that! I can’t remember if I got up to a GS-9 at that
point or not. I think I did maybe get to be a GS-9. I know that I
left Malheur as a GS-11.
MRS. GROVER: How big was your family by then?
MR. MARSHALL: We had two kids. Both children were born
in the hospital at Fallon, NV. They were fourteen months apart.
We had a boy and a girl.
Upon my transfer to Malheur one of the first things that came up
was a movement by a number of the merchants in the town of
Burns to try to get the Blitzen Valley portion of the refuge
turned back to private ownership. They threatened a bill in
Congress, and the local politicians were behind this. They were
determined that the Blitzen Valley would be much more
valuable by being turned back into private ranches. They had a
lot of power and support in Congress. I don’t think people
8
today realize how threatened some of these refuges were at that
point. There wasn’t the public support for them. Ray Erickson
had started a film on the refuge. And not being a bad
photographer myself, I worked some further on that film. But
then to try to put out a film on the refuge, strictly by amateurs in
this case, and try to explain the value of the refuge and what we
did was difficult. The camera equipment was also inadequate.
Fortunately, the issue died. That was one of my first jobs there.
Also at that point, Malheur Lake was down to 10,000 acres
because of a drought. We had a terrible problem with
introduced carp in the lake. The idea was to completely
eliminate carp from the Malheur Basin. It was a tremendously
big effort with an ex-Navy torpedo bomber being hired to spray
rotenone over the lake. All of the streams that lead to the lake
were rotenoned with drip stations. But about two hundred carp
could still be seen in the lake after it cleared up by the fall.
They were the survivors which made the operation only
temporarily successful. It didn’t matter what we did. We could
spray and spray and those carp remained alive. Of course it had
gotten cold by that time and the rotenone was not at as effective.
I don’t know if they had their nose stuck in a spring or what, but
I suspect that. So the carp project was highly successful to start
with. Then in the end it was a failure. You might have some
thoughts on that. But it was highly touted amongst the fishery
people what a great job they had done. And they showed
pictures of it at public gatherings. They had a fisheries
biologist/ photographer on the spot. But John Scharff, the
Refuge Manager, said, “You take pictures too”! Fortunately, I
did. I still see those photos being used. It did work for several
years and we had a tremendous return of sago pondweed, the
important duck food plant, to Malheur Lake once the water
came back and most of the carp were gone. A couple of years
later we had a real influx of terns and grebes which fed on carp
reproduction.
Malheur was another big experience for me. I loved the refuge,
but working with John Scharff was a challenge. Malheur was a
real one-man operation is the sense of ‘who was boss.’ And one
thing he would do with every new staff member was to take him
into his office and inform him that nobody was going to tell him
how to run the Malheur Refuge either from below or from
above. He would say, “If they don’t like it, they can fire me”!
But I had tremendous respect for John. He was the most skilled
administrator I ever worked for. He had been at the refuge….I
first met him there as a boy in 1939! He stayed there until he
retired at 70 in 1971.
Scharff was in many ways great to work for, but on the other
hand, you couldn’t recommend to him anything. You had to
kind of sit back and demonstrate things. He was frustrating to
me because he firmly believed in managing Malheur for
multiple uses like it was a national forest or BLM district,
including lots of grazing and haying. That was his thing. That
was his experience in the Forest Service. He was successful in
part because in part of the people he knew in Washington, D.C.
I can remember seeing him write a letter by hand one day that
started out with, “Dear Rufus”. He was writing to Rufus
Holman who was the Congressman for that area. And Chief
Justice Douglas of the Supreme Court would periodically show
up at the refuge without publicity, and was a guest at the Scharff
house. So were other Congressmen. The Regional office
couldn’t touch him! They could come out and make inspections
and say, ‘Do this, and do that and do the other thing.’ He’d say,
“Oh yes, yes”. But he’d never do them unless he wanted to.
The other thing he’d do when Washington office people came
out was to take them on a tour. Instead of going on the roads
he’d drive across the fields and meadows and through this gate
and that gate and around this circle and that circle and pretty
soon they had no idea where they were. He was very clever.
They would see a lot of wildlife and come back and say what a
great refuge Malheur is before departing. But seeing the money
and improvements going to projects like cattle watering troughs
was very frustrating to me. But now when I look back on it,
here was a refuge that could have been lost; but for Scharff
placating the cattle industry. I don’t know where we’d
otherwise be today. I think he was the right man in the right
place at the right time. Salyer sort of summed it up one day
when, upon arrival, he said, “well Scharff, you still running a
cattle ranch.”
I also need to credit John Scharff’s wife, Florence. She was a
great host. House guests were common place. Florence along
with John were gardeners. Refuge headquarters was a show-place
of flowers in the summer.
MR. GROVER: Was Scharff a biologist too?
MR. MARHSALL: No. He had a two-year degree in animal
husbandry from Oregon Agricultural College, which is now
Oregon State University. I do not mean to infer he did not know
wildlife. He did, and liked to play a game with me on which
one of us saw the first spring arrivals of various summer
resident birds.
MR. GROVER: They now have the bird festival out there in the
spring and it’s the John Scharff Festival.
MR. MARSHALL: Yep, it’s the John Scharff Waterfowl
Festival.
Well, the refuge is still there, and it’s not private land. Yes, and
in later years I began to appreciate Scharff more. When he
neared retirement I wrote a nomination for him to receive
Interior’s Distinguished Service Award. This was against the
advice of his regional office supervisor; but I did it anyway and
Scharff went back to Washington to receive the award in 1971.
He had the longest tenure of any refuge manager in the National
Wildlife Refuge System. His government service began with
the U.S. Forest Service in 1923.
MR. MARSHALL: I didn’t see the political side of it at all
when I was there. I was no politician and it was frustrating to
me when I could see that things could be done a lot better from
the wildlife perspective. Going back and looking at it now, I
saw the pendulum swing completely the other way with great
expanses of solid cattail and bulrushes, which in part the
livestock controlled. The pendulum swung too much the other
way after he left. So Scharff was a pro and a con as far as
9
working with him. I did a lot of photography while I was there
which he was very interested in having me do along with the
wildlife inventory work. He was afraid of the water. He
wouldn’t go out on Malheur Lake in the boat. The airboat on
the lake was really my domain. He had some kind of fear of the
water.
During my time at Malheur, public use of the refuge expanded;
yet there were no public use specialists. During the spring and
that thatearly summer months we were deluged with birders,
naturalists and photographers. Scharff liked to see influential
people personally conducted over the refuge – quite the opposite
of my experience at Sacramento. Scharff did a lot of that
himself, but much of it fell on me. Each weekend from March
through June, we hosted classes from colleges and universities
throughout the northwest. They stayed in the old CCC mess
hall, since torn down. I would conduct the classes on a tour of
the refuge on Saturdays and give them a slide presentation on
Friday or Saturday nights. There were no weekends off during
this period. I wanted to set up a tour route with numbered
stations that referred to a brochure, but Scharff would not have
any part of that. The public was free to roam the refuge at will,
although we often mapped out routes for them.
Eleanor Pruitt, the co-manager of the Frenchglen Hotel saw a
demand for an ornithology course for the local people. She
arranged for this through the state extension service. I
conducted the course which was for college credit and well
attended by some Harney County citizens, including school
teachers.
Another thing that came up at that point was that the local
people and the Corps of Engineers wanted to put a dam on the
Upper Silvies River. They wanted to dam the water behind the
Silvies River so in short water years, they’d have a more
dependable supply. Malheur Lake’s watershed alternates
between series of high and low water years. There was a lot of
push for this dam. Our division known at that time as River
Basin Studies came into the picture. They had me document the
heavy waterfowl use in the spring in the lower Silvies River
valley in the Burns area. We really showed its value to the
spring migration for waterfowl. I feel like that was quite an
accomplishment. The dam never got built. I was at Malheur for
five years. It was difficult from a family standpoint, very
difficult. I wanted to be transferred to the Regional Office and I
got that, finally.
MR. GROVER: Are you talking about being transferred to the
Portland office?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. It was real important for the sake of
my family, and I want to tell you why. The one room school
was inadequate and it was difficult to hire a qualified teacher.
Refuge housing was inadequate. Scharff wanted his biologist to
live on the refuge to be available when needed and to assist with
the visitor load. Even if we had moved to Burns, the road
between the refuge and Burns was unpaved and sometimes in
winter nearly impassable. The house had only two small
bedrooms and our boy and girl had grown old enough to need
separate rooms.
By the time I had moved to the Regional office, the refuge staff
there had grown somewhat. It was still Kenneth McDonald as
Refuge Supervisor plus several assistants who each took a
couple of states.
MR. GROVER: Are we talking about a promotion then? What
year was this?
MR. MARSHALL: This was in 1960. I think I was a GS-11.
There, I ran up against the same old problem of working with
somebody who wasn’t a biologist and really wasn’t oriented in
that way. I will just throw out one example that is here in my
notes. We had on the Red Rocks Lake Refuge of Montana,
graylings, which is a fish that there was some concern about.
They spawned there. Ken (Mac) McDonald was such a guy for
having everything just so neat and orderly and clean that he
insisted on turning a stream that had the Grayling into a straight
line ditch, because he wanted everything laid out in straight
lines. Those were the kinds of frustrations I had. Of course,
that was extremely detrimental to the grayling. He got into a big
hassle with the state fisheries biologist over it, too. But it was
very frustrating for me because at that time I really didn’t feel
like I was accomplishing a lot; others just didn’t think like I did.
At that time there was no public affairs officer in the regional
office. A lot of the public questions having anything to do with
wildlife continually got referred to me. Mac thought I should
become a Public Affairs Officer. That didn’t happen because
Montana Senator Mike Mansfield wanted to fill the job with a
man named Nick Mariana. Nick knew nothing about wildlife
and was a disaster for that position. I kept having to answer
many of his calls about wildlife.
I was in the Regional Office for probably two or three years and
was detailed to the Washington Office on an assignment. Mac
pulled me aside and said, “you know why you’re going there?”
I said I didn’t. He said, “They want to look at you relative to a
position there.” I told him I was glad he tipped me off. The
Washington Office was last place I wanted to go. I handled the
detail okay. But right from the start I let it be known that I was
not the least bit interested in a job in the Washington Office.
This made my friend Ray Erickson very unhappy with me. He
took me aside and he said, “Dave, you’re selfish! You’re just
thinking about yourself!” It made me feel bad, but I just didn’t
want to go to the Washington Office. Besides, we just had built
our first real home and inherited a cabin at Mt. Hood. My
present wife says that I really missed a bet. I don’t know if I did
or not. This would have been in the early 1960’s.
We got the loan on the Duck Stamp money and suddenly we
had a lot of money to buy new refuge lands with. This was a
very rewarding subject to me. We pulled in Leo Couch, who
had retired after serving as Chief of Research. He helped select
lands in the region for refuges. Leo and I worked together on
this. I particularly knew the Willamette Valley. In fact, this
subject came up while I was still at Malheur. A memo came out
from the Washington Office asking for recommendations for
new refuges that could be purchased with duck stamp funds. I
nominated sites which now constitute the William L. Finley and
Baskett Slough refuges in the Willamette Valley.
10
MR. GROVER: Was this part of your detail? Or was this after
the detail?
MR. MARSHALL: I don’t recall whether before or after.
MR. GROVER: So you’re back in Portland now.
MR. MARSHALL: I was only on detail for a couple of weeks
or three weeks. I can’t even remember what it was for. It must
have been not real important. So I was back and we had funds
to purchase new refuges. Even before the funds became
available, J.Clark Salyer came to the regional office.
Unbeknown to any of us, as a result of my recommendation, he
had looked over the Muddy Creek area which eventually got
incorporated into the William L. Finley Refuge. He would
travel the country and inspect areas and refuges by day and
travel at night. He was afraid to fly. He went into the Failing
Estate property at Muddy Creek one day, passing all of the
private land and no trespassing signs, and looked that area over.
He apparently got back out without being seen. When I saw
him in Portland, he said something to the effect of, “Dave, that’s
a great area, buy it!” Mac was sitting there. And of course Mac
thought the world of Salyer. Salyer’s word was god, so that
cinched the William L. Finley Refuge, at least the approval part
for the Service.
But Mac said we had to go see the principal owner who was
Henry Cabell. He was a grandson of Henry Failing, for which
the Failing building in downtown was named. Cabell had the
biggest key piece of area that would be part of the refuge. His
grandfather started it as a hunting reserve, and it was still used
for such. They had a house there that they used for hunting; he
and his friends. So we went to see Henry Cabell. Cabell was
very cordial and invited Mac and I into his office. We explained
to him what we wanted. He said, “No”. It had been in his
family for years and he just couldn’t give it up. I was very
discouraged and walked back out with Mac. Mac said, “No,
you just wait. I’ve seen this happen time and time again. We
want a new area, so we’ll go back and see him in another year or
two. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
Sure enough, we went back. He invited us in again and we sat
down with him. This time we had the Realty Specialist with us.
His name was Don Kistner. Henry Cabell said, “This land has
been in my family for years and my children don’t have any
interest in it. I want to see it remain a wildlife area. I think you
gentlemen have the only answer”. Then he said, “I know how
you people operate. I know you have a low price and a high
price. I don’t want either one. I want it to be right in the
middle”. He was a very public spirited man. We did our review
of the area’s value. He did his independently and they came out
the same in terms of overall value. I will always remember that.
There was no argument over price. After that we were able to
acquire McFadden’s Marsh and some other pieces.
There was a big public outcry against the acquisition of that
refuge and a big public meeting at Corvallis. The farmers were
all against it. The county agricultural extension agent led the
opposition. They were concerned about loss of tax money and
farm land in Benton County. That led to a bill in the State
Legislature which would make state approval for a refuge
conditional upon county approval. That would have killed these
refuges in the Willamette Valley.
MR. GROVER: That’s the same strategy that was used in the
Dakota wetlands, the prairie potholes. They had to have local
approval.
MR. MARSHALL: It passed the Legislature. Mark Hatfield
was then Governor and he vetoed it. He said he did not think it
was good government for local government to have veto power
over something that was favorable to the state as a whole. My
wife at the time was quite active in working to defeat that on
behalf of Portland Audubon. The Oregon Duck Hunters
Association also participated. They did lobby Hatfield after
loosing in the Legislature.
Three refuges eventually immerged in the Willamette Valley. I
scoured the Valley for other potential refuge areas. They
wanted to have five sites. That was part of the condition for
State approval. I had also recommended Baskett Slough. I’d
done a lot of work in college on the William L. Finley refuge
area. At Baskett Slough I used to drive by and see the geese
there. I recommended that and they wanted more areas so I
scoured the valley. One of the candidates I came up with
Ankeny. It was on the bottom of my list. But the engineering
people, because of the water at Ankeny, and a ditch going
through it; recommended Ankeny. So did the Realty people
because they thought the land would be cheaper there. I really
wanted to see a piece of land acquired along the Tualatin along
with Wapato Lake. That was my first choice after Baskett
Slough. It never came to pass. There wasn’t any goose use at
Ankeny, which was the main thrust for these areas. But I did
see the potential and I thought there could be significant goose
use. Maybe I was gambling but I felt with minimum wetland
development geese would use that area and it’s turned out to be
very successful. So I am happy about all three of those areas.
But along comes the General Accounting Office just after the
acquisition of these areas. And they said, “You’ve bought lands
that are not wetlands with Duck Stamp money. The testimony
before Congress by your Director was that you were going to
spend this money on wetlands.” We bought the Finley refuge,
which had a lot of upland with it. It was a marvelous, good,
varied type of habitat. And Baskett Slough had a butte on it.
They wanted to know why we didn’t exclude those. We
explained that the landowners said they would to sell all or
nothing. That was one of the questions we put to Henry Cabell
too. “Would you sell just the wetlands parts?” He had quite a
gleam in his eye and said, “I’ll sell all or nothing”! This pleased
me extremely. He was very public spirited and he saw the value
of the William Finley Refuge as kind of an outdoor laboratory
for students at Oregon State. I know that’s a lot of what was
behind it. Anyway, GAO came in and they had the big
investigation. Of course, I was the first line of defense on this
thing. I selected the areas and RD wasn’t happy with me
because of what I had done. Obviously he didn’t want a GAO
investigation. The irony of that is that the GAO head
investigator was a former buckaroo from the Roaring Springs
Ranch which had grazing/haying permits at Malheur. I knew
11
him there, after which he left the buckaroo business and went to
college and into the GAO. He was one of those people who
wanted the Blitzen Valley at Malheur to go back into private
ownership. I can’t remember his name. But the GAO had their
investigation and there was a big headline on the Oregonian that
FWS had misappropriated funds or something like that. Then,
Ira Gabrielson showed up. He wanted to look at this situation.
So Ray Glahn and I put him in our airplane, a Cessna 180 by
that time.
MR. GROVER: What position was Ira Gabrielson by this time?
MR. MARSHALL: He was President, or President Emeritus of
the Wildlife Management Institute. He had a lot of say, I can
assure you. I learned that quickly, after it got to Washington.
He didn’t really retire! Anyway, he showed up at the regional
office. We took him to the airport and strapped him into the
Cessna. We had heavy duty agricultural type shoulder and
seatbelts. He said he felt like we were putting him into a horse
collar. He didn’t have much time. We made an aerial tour of
the refuges in the Willamette Valley. I complained about the
GAO investigation. He kept saying, “To hell with ‘em! To hell
with ‘em!” I could tell he was very pleased with the three areas.
“To hell with ‘em. Don’t worry about it!” Then he returned to
Washington. I never heard a thing more about this issue. Years
later, I asked John Gottschalk about it. My close friend Fred
Evenden and I used to go birding with John on Sunday
mornings when I worked in Washington, D. C. I asked John
whatever happened to the GAO investigation of the Willamette
Valley refuges. He said that he was at a congressional hearing
headed by Julia Butler Hansen, who chaired the Interior
Appropriations Committee. She was from southern
Washington. She brought up the GAO investigation.
According to John Gottschalk, she said, “Mr. Gottschalk, what
are you going to do about this?” John said, “I told her;
absolutely nothing”! She looked kind of startled and said,
“Well, I guess that’s that”! I learned this years later. I don’t
know what role Gabe had in that thing but he obviously came
out for a reason.
Another thing that happened: I’d periodically go to the Willapa
Refuge with Ray Glahn. One day we flew down over the
islands in the lower Columbia River area. They are marshy
islands, which I didn’t know were there until the flight. You
couldn’t see them from the ground. I wondered who these
islands belonged to. Jim Shaw, who was the Realty Specialist,
then looked into it and found out that they belonged to the
county for back taxes. So Jim went to the County
Commissioners. They said the islands were of no value to them
and we could have them. That’s how easy you could do things
in those days! Yeah! So we acquired the Lewis and Clark
Refuge just as simple as that! The only stipulation was that they
remain open to hunting. We weren’t buying them, so we
weren’t under this restriction to have part of it closed to hunting.
Another thing that happened was that Bob Twist, who was
Manager at Willapa had flown the Oregon coast and taken a
number of good photographs showing the seabird colonies there.
Then, Ray Glahn and I started flying it. We saw that there was
a lot more to the offshore bird rocks than the existing Three
Arch Rocks and Goat Island refuges. So we inventoried the sea
birds on the offshore rocks and determined that they were still
public lands under BLM. We went to BLM and asked if we
could withdraw them. They said, “Fine, have at ‘em!” There
were no environmental impact statements; no public hearings
and they were transferred to FWS.
This is what frustrates me today with what the people have to go
through and put up with. That’s how we added all the larger
rocks to the Oregon Islands Refuge. There was nothing to that.
I learned about Ledbetter Point, now a part of the Willapa
Refuge; Ledbetter is an extension of the Long Beach peninsula.
It constituted accreted land. Sand had built up in that area over
the years so it was government, BLM land. From some of my
Audubon friends in Seattle, Washington, I learned about this
area and what a great area it was for brant and shore birds. So I
thought that we ought to get that into the Refuge System. We
ran into a roadblock, which was the State Parks Department.
They had their eyes on it. The RD and I went up and saw the
Parks Director. He had a grandiose plan to put a hotel on
Ledbetter Point plus campgrounds, riding stables and all kinds
of great things for public use. The Audubon Society in Seattle
got wind of that. And the Portland Audubon Society did too. I
led a joint field trip for the two Audubon groups to Ledbetter
Point. By working together we managed to beat the state out on
acquiring that area. But in so doing, I got virtually a reprimand
from the Regional Director. He was very, very unhappy with
me because he was going by a letter from the Secretary that said
we ought to get along with our sister State agencies. He wanted
to make things peaceful and let the state have the area, so they
could do what they wanted to with it.
MR. GROVER: Who was the RD at that time?
MR. MARSHALL: It was John Findlay.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s another story. There’s a lot of good
things about John Findlay. But he was very unhappy that I
created this stir by encouraging the Audubon groups to work the
political ropes to get that area into the Refuge System.
MR. GROVER: Were relations between the FWS and the State
generally good at this time?
MR. MARSHALL: They were better by that time. When John
Findlay and I went to see the State Parks Director, we also went
to see John Biggs the Director of the Washington [State] Game
Department. John Biggs said that he was with us, but he
couldn’t say anything [publicly].
MR. GROVER: Did you have good relations with Oregon too?
MR. MARSHALL: Fair, but it got better as time went on. So
anyway, we got Ledbetter Point. I got into trouble and then a
letter came from John Gottschalk complementing us on what
we’d accomplished. He also said, in effect, that sometimes
things work out fine when there is controversy. So I was, I felt,
exonerated at that point. Nothing more was said. Ledbetter
Point became part of the Williapa Refuge.
12
Alaska became part of the region at that point. I was sent to
Alaska a number of different times, more so than anybody else
in the Regional Office. It was kind of rough duty up there.
There was a lot of camping and most of the people in the office
didn’t want to do that. Two of the trips were to look at the
situation with Musk Ox in Alaska. That’s a long story, I don’t
know if I want to go into it. But it ended up with Musk Ox
being transplanted back to the wild in Alaska. It was very
interesting to be on the Artic Slope in the middle of winter. It
was a great experience.
Hawaii was a forgotten place. We had nobody in Hawaii. Dick
Griffith, in the 1960’s, finally got a contract with Hawaii Fish
and Game to oversee the Hawaiian Islands Refuge. It hadn’t
been visited by anybody in the FWS since 1923. So I was sent
out to review the situation in about 1963. The military was out
there tracking some of the first satellites and they had four of
five men camped on various islands in the Refuge. The state
was rightfully concerned because they were bringing in plant
propagules such as seeds in their gear which could get started
on the fragile islands . Examples included dandelions, potatoes,
onions, and who knows what else. The state had no influence
over the military so they said we should send somebody out to
look at the situation. Any type of duty like this seemed to go to
me, which made me happy. The Navy took us out to the refuge
with a LST and helicopter aboard. The Navy was servicing the
military people there too. I’ve got a lot of great pictures from
that trip. With two state biologists, I inventoried the wildlife on
a number of the islands. We camped out on Laysan Island for
five days. It was quite an adventure. I came back and
recommended that we put a FWS employee in Hawaii. We
selected Gene Kridler, who succeeded me a Malheur. He went
out there then as chief law enforcement officer, Refuge Manager
and everything else. Kridler did a tremendous job starting FWS
activities in Hawaii. Eventually more refuges in Hawaii came
about.
One thing that I know my bosses did not always appreciate was
my working with some of the conservation groups like the
Audubon Society. It was okay if they thought I was doing the
right thing, but sometimes they didn’t appreciate it, like on the
Willapa issue. As now, I worked a lot with Portland Audubon’s
board and conservation committee, which sought my biological
expertise. In fact I was on their Board during all of this time in
Portland. We got some things done by just going around the
FWS. Some of my bosses were not too happy about that. I
suppose some of that goes on now, I don’t know, but it got
things done. In 1972 I authored a small book published by the
Audubon Society of Portland. It was titled Familiar Birds of
Northwest Forests, Fields and Gardens, and came out in 1973.
At least 20,000 copies of the book were sold.
In the early 1960s, Fred Evenden, Executive Director of The
Wildlife Society, came to John McKeen, Director of the then
Oregon Game Commission. Dean Marriage of the Soil
Conservation Service and me were urging the formation of a
state chapter of The Wildlife Society. It hinged on the state
since they had by far the greatest number of members. John
turned the idea down, saying the state legislature would not go
for paying for meeting attendance. A few months later John
came up with the idea of classifying an annual state meeting of
the society a training conference for his biologists and
managers. A chapter was formed. John was the first President
and I was the second. This state chapter is now one of the most
active in the country. It helped bring state and federal biologists
together. I subsequently served as President of the Northwest
section of the Society.
During this period, the Forest Service proposed an interagency
committee to designate research natural areas on federal lands in
OR and WA. I was designated to represent FWS. We set up
several such areas on national wildlife refuges in the region,
including three at Finley Refuge. The National Park Service
declined to participate.
In the fall of 1971, I was invited to substitute for one term for
Stan Harris, a wildlife professor at Humboldt State College.
Stan was going on sabbatical and it was the policy of the college
to find someone who was active in our field to serve as a
replacement. The fact that I did not have a graduate degree did
not matter. I received permission to take leave from the FWS
during the spring term of 1972 to teach at Humboldt. I taught a
class in waterfowl management, conducted field trips for an
ornithology class and handled a seminar. It turned out to be a
very rewarding assignment.
I was of course in the regional office during the height of the
Job Corps program. When the Malheur job corps station closed,
Bob Russell, Ass’t Refuge Supervisor in charge of Oregon and
Washington refuges, was anxious to see it declared surplus so
properties used by the station could be declared surplus and
distributed as needed to other refuges. He also looked at the
facility as administrative “headache” and should be demolished.
I disputed that, having been well aware of the need for housing
and eating facilities for the numerous school and conservation
groups which visited Malheur. The lack of such facilities other
than the old CCC mess hall was a problem while I was there. I
gained support for my position from Eleanor Pruitt, former
manager of the Frenchglen Hotel, who fed many univerisity
groups their evening meals at virtually no cost. Eleanor had
since become librarian for Mt. Hood College. I went around my
good friend Bob Russell to the regional administrative officer,
Henry Beatkey. Henry was very education oriented and when
he found we could not turn the facility over to a university by
one manual, he looked in another which said it would be OK.
Thus the Malheur Field Station was born. It was managed by a
consortium of colleges and universities. But the station director
appointed by the consortium was a disaster for Malheur. He
was an extreme environmentalist who wrote Scared Cows at the
Public Trough. Locally we still have not overcome the public
relations problems he brought on. However, we can be proud of
the station’s role overall.
Also during this assignment, the Endangered Species
Preservation Act of 1966 and the subsequent Endangered
Species Conservation Act of 1969 were passed. John Aldrich, a
Service employee at the U.S. National Museum and world
famous ornithologist headed up the preparation of the
endangered bird species lists for these Acts. When it came to
western birds he relied in part on me so I had a part with the first
13
endangered species lists. What I am proud of is the fact that no
bird got listed which should not have been, despite a fact we did
not have all the information that would have been desirable
MR. MARSHALL: The next thing is my transfer to the
Washington office. I was getting to feeling like dead wood in
Refuges in the Regional Office. Apparently I wasn’t that
popular. I felt like the Regional Refuge Supervisor at that time
pushed me aside. I was told later he was jealous of my
knowledge of the region. So I had to do something. My
children were long out of high school by then and I did finally
agree to go to the Washington Office to work in the Office of
Endangered Species, a topic, which very much interested me. I
went to work under a man named Gene Ruhr whose boss was
Keith Schreiner. I thought a lot of both of them and. got along
very well. I started out as being responsible for listing birds and
mammals.
MR. GROVER: Had you been promoted again by this time?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, I got promoted to a GS-13. So I was
in the Office of Endangered Species. It was officially called the
Office of Endangered Species and Foreign Activities. There
was about a half a dozen of us. The pitch then was that the
Regional Offices weren’t competent to handle endangered
species. Endangered Species programs should be handled
strictly by Washington, which I disagreed with very much,
having come from a Regional Office. We were overwhelmed
with work. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed at
the beginning of my assignment. I tell you, the workload was
just way too much. All kinds of things didn’t get done that
should have been done. We just didn’t have the necessary
staffing.
MR. GROVER: Did you supervise staff?
MR. MARSHALL: No, Keith Schreiner was there to start with.
Gene Ruhr was in charge of domestic stuff. Then there was a
foreign activities chief. We had just about half a dozen
professionals in the office – all very capable people.
MR. GROVER: You weren’t divided organizationally with a
branch of listing and a branch of recovery for example?
MR. MARSHALL: Well, yes in a sense. I was in charge of
listing domestic birds and mammals at the Washington office to
start with. A representative of the timber industry visited me
about every week over the spotted owl. At this point I was in a
quandary over the owl. I felt that if preventative measures were
not taken it was going to have to be listed. Schreiner sent me
out to talk to BLM and Forest Service people in Portland. I
couldn’t get those people to listen at all. It was just like, “You
mean the spotted owl could stop the timber industry? To hell
with you”! That was the attitude. The Forest Service and BLM
biologists could see the light, but they couldn’t get through to
their bosses.
MR. GROVER: When was that Dave?
MR. MARSHALL: That would have been in 1974. I had this
dilemma. I really felt that this owl should be listed. But it was a
political decision partly. I knew that if we listed it, it would
probably mean the end of the Endangered Species Act at that
point. The timber industry was so strong. The other concern
was that I was afraid they could beat it because we still really
didn’t have enough biological information on the owl to make a
really ironclad case. So that disturbed me as much as anything.
I knew we just didn’t have the demographic information that we
needed to make a really good case. We also did not have data
on home range size. The spotted owl was an issue that I really
lost sleep over. What was the right thing to do?
They reorganized the Office of Endangered Species and then I
headed up the recovery operations. I became the staff officer
responsible for recovery. Schreiner and Ruhr came up with the
idea of recovery teams and recovery plans. So this meant
writing up guidelines for both. I subsequently went around the
country conducting workshops for federal, state and academic
people on how to prepare Recovery Plans. By that time the
office had grown with some very capable biologists.
MR. GROVER: Was there a focus at that time on a particular
species?
MR. MARSHALL: Of course we had trouble with what we
called the ‘glamour species’. Everybody wanted to spend our
money on bald eagles, wolves, the condor, the peregrine falcon
and the like. That was a constant problem. Bald eagles and
wolves in a way saved the Act as we got ridiculed for wanting to
list non game fishes, amphibians and some plants like the
furbish lousewort.
MRS. GROVER: And whooping cranes?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, whooping cranes were a big thing too.
We called them all ‘glamour species’. But wolves and the bald
eagle “saved the day.” The timber industry sponsored a bill in
Congress to exclude subspecies. That way we’d have to drop
the spotted owl because the listing of it would have been for
only the northern subspecies. Then it was pointed out that the
bald eagle, wolves and peregrine falcons at the time were listed
as subspecies. For example, the gray wolf was listed only in the
U.S. outside Alaska. I had frustrations with the Secretary’s
office. There was a guy in that office named Amos Eno. Have
you ever heard of him?
MR. GROVER: Oh yes.
MR. MARSHALL: He worked for Nat Reed , Interior’s
Assistant. Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. He was
Nat Reed’s right hand wildlife guy. Nat Reed and Dillon
Ripley, who was head of the Smithsonian, had lunch
periodically. I always knew when they had lunch because I’d
get a call from Amos. He’d say to put so and so, and so and so,
on a recovery team. They were usually people we knew. Some
of them were trouble makers and we knew they couldn’t work
with people. He would also say to get this or that species listed.
I’d get all of these instructions from Amos. Then I’d go to
Keith and ask him, “What am I going to do”? Keith would say,
14
“Just forget about it, it will die”! That’s exactly what would
happen…the next thing you know Amos was on to something
else. But it was kind of frustrating.
MRS. GROVER: When Amos was heading up the Fish &
Wildlife Foundation, when it began, I didn’t have good feelings
about the Foundation. I do now. But it took a long time to
make it feel good. I just felt that they were against us rather
than with us. They were supposed to be helping us.
.
MR. MARSHALL: I just didn’t get along with Amos. I was
also disappointed with a decision by Assistant Secretary Nat
Reed who reversed a decision by our office to list the California
sea otter. I maintained the population was stable and we had
higher priorities. When asked why he took this action, his
response was the he promised Margaret Owings we would list it.
Ms. Owings was a strong proponent for the California sea otter.
I also opposed the listing of the grizzly bear, feeling that the
states had it in hand.
When I went to the Washington Office, Keith Schreiner told me
that if I couldn’t take the Washington Office, eventually he
would try to get me back to Portland, assuming he still had a
position to do so. That was part of the condition of my
employment there. When I told him that I had had enough, he
would see if he could get me a job back in Portland. Well after
four or five years, I went to him and said that I had had enough.
He said, “Okay”. And he contacted Kahler Martinson. Kahler
by that time had become the Regional Director in Portland. He
had been Assistant Director for Migratory Bird Management in
Washington. I don’t know what went on there, but they said I
could go back to be in charge of Endangered Species in
Portland. I don’t know if the job was even advertised. I don’t
know how it was arranged. But I had the Washington office
experience that was required. Kahler wanted me, and Keith
wanted to see me in that job and that’s what happened. The
person who was handling it was Phil Lehenbauer. Phil was a
good friend of mine. In fact, he was the first Refuge Manager
for Finley NWR. I helped put him there. He worked under me
as a student trainee at Malheur. I thought the world of Phil, and
here I was kind of taking his job. But he knew that he wasn’t
going to get that job permanently because he didn’t have
Washington office experience. Phil accepted the situation, and
was really a deputy to me in a way. He handled all of the
administrative and budgetary stuff that I didn’t like handling. I
liked handling the policy stuff and the Section 7 consultations
and so forth. Phil and I were a real team and I had an excellent
working relationship with him. I also felt highly of the Regional
Director, Kahler Martinson and his deputy, Bill Meyer.
MR. GROVER: Can you clarify the layout of the organization
at this point?
MR. MARSHALL: The organization was that Endangered
Species was a separate entity. It was under the Assistant
Regional Director for Federal Aid, who was Ed Chamberlain.
So an Assistant Director had Federal Aid and Endangered
Species at that time. I’m glad you asked that because I know
it’s different now. We built up a staff comprised of Phil
Lehenbauer, a botanist, a recovery plan person, a section 7
person plus secretarial help. We had a good organization there
with Endangered Species. We probably had more Section 7
consultations than all of the other regions combined. I know we
did. We probably had as many listed species as all of the other
regions combined and yet we couldn’t get much relief from the
budget standpoint to do what needed to be done. Each RD was
interested in getting his share of the pie when it came to
dividing it up. There’s not a lot to say about that. There was no
such thing as HCPs at that point. We were mostly involved with
listings, recovery plans and Section 7 consultations.
MR. GROVER: Was the spotted owl listed by this time?
MR. MARSHALL: No, we looked at that again with the same
dilemma. It became pretty evident by the time I left that we
were going to have to list it, but then the Service turned it down.
I retired in 1981 from the FWS.
MR. GROVER: What about the condor? They had been listed
by that time.
MR. MARSHALL: Oh yes. It was brought in under the 1973
act.
MR. GROVER: And you were working on the recovery plan?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and I did a lot with the condor in fact,
way before the Endangered Species Act. I went down and
looked at the condor situation because there was a proposed
dam that would affect the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. That was
way before the 1973 Act. When you really look back on it, we
were involved with endangered species issues from the time of
the National Bison Range early in the last century. People don’t
realize that. The Red Rocks Lake Refuge for trumpeter swans
too. J. Clark Salyer always used to say, “If it ever looks like
there is a species in danger, that’s our first priority.”
MR. GROVER: This was before the Act defined what an
endangered or threatened species was.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes! We realized our responsibility there.
There’s not a lot to say about my last few years in the Regional
Office. By that time, we had this complicated thing for
evaluating performance ratings that really bothered me. Setting
performance standards and performance ratings you’d sit down
with the most dedicated person and they would want to put more
things down to do for their year than they could possibly do.
Then you had to turn around and rate them on how much they
got done. I thought it was very unfair. I had to really pull some
people back on what expectations for themselves were, or they
would come out with a poor rating. That took so much
paperwork that it really bothered me. I was 55, and I had well
over thirty years of Federal service considering my time with
the Forest Service, Park Service and military.
So that’s when I quit…and I could see the Reagan
administration coming along so that’s the time I decided to bow
out, on my birthday. It was March 7, 1981. That was the end of
my FWS career. I was handicapped through a number of these
years in that my wife turned into a mental case, and refused
15
treatment. It was a terrible personal situation. I thought that
maybe things would be better if I was home with her, which
they weren’t. That was another factor.
MRS. GROVER: This was Betty?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. It was really sad when you’ve got a
loved one who just won’t admit that there is anything wrong. It
was really difficult. It was hard on me all of the time that I was
in Washington because of that. And it was hard on my children.
I didn’t realize how hard it was on them.
MRS. GROVER: So your family accompanied you when you
went to Washington?
MR. MARSHALL: Not the children, but she did. She actually
loved it. She really did. But she had a period where she
couldn’t do anything but sit in the bedroom. She maintained
there was nothing wrong with her. She has passed away now.
MRS. GROVER: Let’s talk about your two children for a
minute. You had a boy and a girl, born in Fallon, NV. What are
they doing now?
MR. MARSHALL: The boy is a professional outdoor
photographer. He is very successful in knowing what people
want in outdoor pictures and what he can sell. He’s also put out
four coffee table books. One is lying over there. They are state
books like the one that Ray Atkinson did for Oregon with the
same publisher. He’s done three Washington ones and an Idaho
one. He married in later years to a lady who had three teenage
sons. With my son, she had triplets that are two and a half years
old. So I have my first grandchildren, who are triplets! They
are a handful! They live in Wenatchee, Washington. He got
interested in photography at Malheur when he was a little boy.
And I got him a camera; a complicated one. He right away
learned how to use it and started taking pictures. Of course
there was a world of opportunity of things to photograph. He’s
quite a naturalist. He majored in Fisheries at OSU, but he ended
up as a professional photographer. He got a master’s at the
University of Idaho.
My daughter is a businessperson. By the time she was twenty,
she was co-owner of a bicycle shop in downtown Portland, right
at SW 12th and Morrison Streets. Now, she is in the
international banking business and lives just out of Hanover,
New Hampshire. She does consulting work on international
banking for big international banking firms where they want to
review practices of various foreign banks, particularly in third
world countries. She goes to those banks and sees what their
practices are and how they have to change in order to be loaned
money by the big banks. She also buys houses, fixes them up
and sells them.
Raising children at Sacramento and Malheur Refuges was a
mixed bag. This was when they were between 2 and 10 years
old. I already mentioned the sub-standard housing, school
problems and lack of other children for playmates; but there
were positives. FWS was at that time very family oriented. I
have reason to believe it came from the Gabrielson era. I was
free to take my family with me on field trips so long as it did not
mean extra government expense. Son John liked to go out on
Malheur Lake with me in the airboat, and daughter Janet
especially liked to go with me when I conducted field trips for
visitors, especially college classes. She got to be pretty good at
bird identification, and as soon as a group in a car caravan
recognized this she would be invited to ride in a car with some
of the students. When Ray Glahn flew in for aerial waterfowl
surveys, one or both of them would go along. It got to be such
common place with them that when asked if they wanted to go
on a flight, sometimes it would be yes and other times no. I
can’t imagine such occurrences now. Being at Malheur also
allowed us to have a horse for the children.
MRS. GROVER: Don’t you have a new wife now?
MR. MARSHALL: Oh yes. My wife, Georgia, is a former high
school sweetheart. She and I went together in high school.
After the death of my first wife, and the loss of Georgia’s
husband; we got married a year ago last August, 1999. I was
very close to her parents. Her maiden name is Leupold.
Leupold and Stevens Instruments in Beaverton is owned by her
family. They are still the owners of it. The company is well
known by hunters for the rifle scopes it manufactures.
I think I’ve pointed out that we had some top biologists in the
FWS at the upper levels; Ira Gabrielson and J. Clark Salyer are
two examples. But many of the people I was working under
early in my career were not trained professional biologists.
They were kind of jealous of people with college degrees. They
were more interested in seeing facility upkeep on refuges. They
were very interested in animal damage control. That was a big
thing along with law enforcement and eventually hatcheries.
But with the people I worked for in refuges, it was a lot more
important how a station looked…your performance rating was
based on whether you had the buildings painted and whether the
lawn was cut and the garden hose was coiled up. That’s how
your performance was rated in Kenneth MacDonald’s eyes. The
cleanliness of the windshields on the trucks was important too;
not how much you attracted in terms of wildlife. This was a
frustration to me at an early time. Engineering, as I said, was
very strong. The pitch was that if you got money to build more
dikes and water control structures you could stabilize water
levels. Non-professional people then were really the ones in
charge. The last thing they wanted was people with Ph.D.s it
seemed like, although Ray Erickson was an exception. They
were afraid Ph.D.s wouldn’t want to get out there and work at
all. So graduate degrees were not encouraged at all.
I mentioned the problems in getting anything in the way of
equipment that the biologists needed. All they thought we
needed was a pickup, a notebook and some binoculars. On the
plus side, I am so happy with the funding today, in the FWS.
People don’t realize how tough it was then. For example, the
Refuge Manager in Sacramento, who preceded Vernon Ekedahl,
wouldn’t let the employees use the refuge shop. He wouldn’t
even let them pump up the air in their car tires because he said
that was air pumped at government expense. They were
extremely tight in Refuges with money in those days. To go on
a trip, your per diem was looked at very closely. A lot of people
16
went on their own. The housing was horrible on Refuges. I see
a lot that has changed to the good, including salaries.
I remember when I was at the Sacramento Refuge some Civil
Service auditors came in. They went over my job and audited it.
I think I was a GS-7 then. According to their audit, I should
have been an “11”, because I was working in a field without any
immediate supervision. That was common. You’d have
Managers that were in charge of small refuges who were GS 5s.
We didn’t really see a change in this until the 1960s. J. Clark
Salyer, said one day, “Hold salaries down. That way we’ll only
get the most dedicated people!” That was his policy. In a way,
he had a point. He did get dedicated people. They helped make
up for low salaries some by charging very little for housing on
refuges, but this later caught up with the FWS when GSA
discovered housing was not being charged for at going rates.
MR. GROVER: What grade would a GS-5 then, be
comparable to today in your mind? Do you think it would be a
GS-11?
MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, yes.
MR. GROVER: GS-11 is defined as the full professional level,
in other words, with a Bachelor’s degree.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s what it was according to this audit.
But I was a GS-7.
MR. GROVER: But you hadn’t seen that yet?
MR. MARSHALL: I just learned that when the auditors
showed up. Of course, FWS didn’t do anything about it.
Money was so tight. I’ve seen tremendous change there.
Obviously, the downside of things I see going on today is all of
the regulatory hoops. As much as I like NEPA and the
principles behind it, I can’t help but see the insurmountable
amount of time involved with NEPA documents, public
hearings, and so forth. I gave the example of how easy it was to
acquire some of these refuges, like the Lewis and Clark Refuge,
when you didn’t have all of these roadblocks put in front of you.
I felt that morale was generally very high in the Refuge Division in
those early days, despite the low salaries and poor housing
conditions. We just had people who were really dedicated to what
we were doing. There was little thought given to the forty hour
week in the field. I mean, if you had to get up and run a waterfowl
brood count at five in the morning, you did. There wasn’t always
time off, and certainly no compensation for the extra time. There
was a lot of work to be done on weekends. On the other hand,
John Scharff’s philosophy was, ‘well, if you want to go fishing in
the middle of the day, go!’ He was always running into a problem
when the auditors would come down from Portland. He liked to
tell the story about one of his maintenance men. He and the
auditor went were out on the refuge around noon and found one of
the maintenance men fishing. The auditor said, “He shouldn’t be
here, he’s supposed to be working!” So John asked the man, “Joe
what time did you get up this morning?” Joe answered, “Five
o’clock.” Then he asked him what he did at that hour, and Joe ran
off a bunch of details involving taking care of refuge horses and
irrigating fields. The auditor got the point.
MR. GROVER: Earlier you said that you focused in on the
USFWS. Why not the Park Service, the Forest Service or the
state?
MR. MARSHALL: I had done work for the Forest Service in the
Fremont National Forest. They had maybe one biologist during
my last year. There just weren’t the opportunities there in terms of
jobs at that time. I didn’t see in the Forest Service where I’d have
much opportunity.
With respect to going into the Park Service’s Naturalist Program, I
had worked for Crater Lake NP one summer. I found that they
were a terrible bureaucracy next to the Forest Service. They were
very bureaucratic. I even had to sign my name to check a shovel
out of the supply house! That was clear back in 1948. I didn’t
like the looks of that at all. And really, the FWS was doing the
things that I was most interested in. With the state fish and
wildlife agencies; when I went to work at Stillwater, I got
acquainted with a number of state people in Nevada. I found out
that the Director of Nevada Fish and Game was going to hire me,
but the FWS offered me a position first. So that’s how I ended up,
but I could have gone with the State of Nevada at the time.
MRS. GROVER:. Don’t forget to tell about your musk ox story!
MR. GROVER: Lets change gears a bit. I would like to get some
of your career story’s and reminiscences. How about starting off
with some memories? What about the cranes?
MR. MARSHALL: When I was in Washington, the President at
the time was first Nixon and then Ford. During Ford’s service, the
Emperor of Japan paid a State visit to the U.S. Of course, I didn’t
get to see the Emperor but people in the National Aquarium did.
They were very impressed with him because he was a Marine
Biologist. He brought with him, as a State gift to the U. S., a
bunch of exotic carp that are popular in Japan. They were going
to be put at the National Aquarium. It was a big collection of all
kinds of exotic carp. So this meant that President Ford had to give
a gift in return. Knowing that cranes are revered in Japan, a
decision was made by the Washington office to donate to the
Emperor, a pair of sandhill cranes from North America.
Hal O’Connor was selected to do the honor of taking those cranes
to Japan. For some reason, he couldn’t go and I was picked at the
last minute to take the cranes to Japan. I got them from Ray
Erickson out at Patuxent. Ray gave me instructions. He said
they’ll be fine just as long as they don’t get overheated. We had to
get all of the government passports and other papers in just a
matter of hours. Wayne Bohl was in the Washington office and
did a lot of foreign activities. He knew how to go through
Customs and get me all of the stuff I needed instantly. Otherwise,
they said it would have taken several days. The next thing I knew
I was at the airport with two sandhill cranes in crates. I got on a
Northwest Airlines plane, and the cranes were in the hold. I made
sure that the temperature was right. They kept assuring me that it
was okay. We left Washington, D.C. The crew had been given
instructions about why I was along and what an important mission
17
I was on. They were told, ‘Whatever you do, don’t foul up again!’
It turned out that the airline had transported the carp and about
half of them died because they messed up by not giving them
proper oxygen or something. Anyway, when we got to Chicago
everything was fine. I checked on the cranes and went on to
Anchorage. The airline people kept saying, “Well, I hope you
make it okay.” I thought to myself that something was screwy.
When we got to Anchorage, they announced that we couldn’t fly
on to Tokyo. The aircraft didn’t have the duel radios for over-water
travel. One of them was broken. They knew that in
Washington, D. C. They knew it in Chicago. They were passing
the buck to Anchorage to fix it. So my thoughts of Northwest
went down right then. I thought, ‘what am I going to do? I’ve got
these cranes here!”
MR. GROVER: Rent a motel room!
MRS. GROVER: For two cranes!
MR. MARSHALL: The hotel rooms in Anchorage were nearly
filled up. I got stuck in a room with somebody that I didn’t even
know. I said, “What are we going to do with the cranes?! The
airline told me they could put them in the Pilot’s Lounge and give
me the key. About two in the morning, I woke up and wondered
what the temperature was in that Pilot’s Lounge. I neglected to
check it. Ray told me, “Whatever you do, don’t let them get too
warm”. So I got a taxi and went out to the Pilot’s Lounge and
found the cranes were fine. They knew me by then, and
everything looked good.
So twenty-four hours later we checked in on to the next flight in to
Tokyo. The Japanese were rather put out that we were twenty-four
hours late. But it was an interesting trip. Northwest put me
in first class, even though my ticket wasn’t for that. The ground
crew opened the door of the plane in Tokyo, and the guy says,
“We want man with cranes first!” I heard him say that because I
was in first class, right by the door. So they put me off on the
tarmac and they were supposed to leave those cranes alone until I
got there. But they had already moved them from the hold. This
was kind of worrisome to me. What if those cranes were to die?
But it turned out they were fine. And they put them in a police
paddy wagon. They had a police escort for the cranes.
The Ambassador’s representative met me in an American made
car and we went through the streets of Tokyo with this entourage
of police motorcycles and the cranes. We took them to the Zoo.
Then of course they said, “We know you must be tired, but we
want to have a press conference”. The Japanese being what they
are; the first thing they asked me was, “How old are you”? The
second question was, “How many years have you worked for the
FWS”? The State Department had given me a special title. It was
really a high title. It wasn’t real! It was an interesting experience.
The Public Affairs office in Washington made a real boo boo.
They named the cranes “Martha” and “George.” This just didn’t
go over with the Japanese at all!
It was kind of up to me as to how long I stayed because they
provided a guide for me, an assistant from the Zoo. They were
going to wine and dine me and take me sightseeing for just as long
as I stayed there. It was up to the Ambassador to formerly donate
the cranes to the Emperor. He was going to do that after they were
out of quarantine. It was a fun trip.
MR. GROVER: But the bottom line is; were they okay when you
left Japan? Good old, tough Sand Hills.
MR. MARSHALL: They were okay. I never heard anything
more about the cranes! I did my job!
MR. GROVER: Did you get to fly back first class?
MR. MARSHALL: I don’t remember. I think I did. It was
Christmas time and I flew back to Portland. The family came out
too.
MR. GROVER: Let’s talk about your photography. You were
showing me one of your books, Wild Sanctuaries. There are a
number of others like, Birds in Our Lives and what else?
MR. MARSHALL: And Waterfowl Tomorrow. The later two are
both USFWS publications.
MR. GROVER: And these are pictures that you took when you
were working for FWS?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. Those books are around here. I
continually had a call for photographs. I never got any money for
them because the FWS manual said there were questions about
whose time were taken on – my time versus Service time.
Furthermore, they argued that the pictures were taken because of
my knowledge that I had gained out of the FWS. So, I never got a
dime for photographs.
MRS. GROVER: Tell us about the Musk Ox.
MR. MARSHALL: Okay, the Musk Ox in Alaska. Going back
into history; in the 1930s the FWS imported some Musk Oxen
from Greenland. They had become extirpated in Alaska. So they
picked some up in Greenland. They were transported all the way
to Fairbanks where they raised them on a kind of a farm. Well,
the money ran out and the musk oxen were barged over to
Nunivak Island. I asked Gabrielson about it years later and he said
that they just didn’t know what else to do. They didn’t have the
money to handle and take care of them so they dumped them off
on that island which is out in the Bering Sea.
Those musk oxen grew to a herd of about six or seven hundred.
Nunivak Island was not their natural habitat. Their natural habitat
is a dry, desert like Arctic climate with very little snow. This
island had heavy snowfall something like the Pacific Northwest
Cascades. The only forage the musk oxen had during the winter
was in a dune area where the snow would blow off and expose the
grass. The oxen were over eating their range. There were too
many of them for the amount of winter forage that was available.
The FWS proposed a hunting season on them. All hell broke
loose then about the idea that it would be just as easy as going out
and shooting a cow; which is about right. Governor Wally Hickel
was in on that too. He was totally against it because the public
was against it.
18
We had a real problem of how to handle the musk oxen. What we
wanted to do was to be able to move a bunch of them to the Arctic
Slope and other areas where they were originally present in Alaska
before extirpation. But moving animals of that weight would be
tremendously costly. There was no money to accomplish this and
it turned into a public relations issue. I think John Gottschalk and
I know John Findlay were involved; they contacted the Director of
the Canadian Wildlife Service, John Tenner, to advise us on the
situation. John Tenner, it turned out, did his thesis on the musk
ox. Even though he was the Director of the Canadian Wildlife
Service he wanted to go on this trip himself. There was an
entourage then of John Tenner, myself and the Refuge Staff. We
toured Nunivak Island, which is about fifty by sixty miles with an
Eskimo guide. We toured partly by boat. We looked at the range
conditions. John Tenner said that he wanted to look at it in the
winter. He also wanted to see the area that was proposed for them
to be transplanted to. We went back in the winter, and went up to
the Arctic Slope. We saw conditions there, which according to
John Tenner, were very favorable for musk oxen. There were
none there of course.
Then we went back to Nunivak Island and looked at it under
winter conditions. We went all over the island using snowmobiles
and camped out with an Eskimo guide. He was a tremendous
guide. He was wonderful. They are great people, those Eskimos.
They found out it was my birthday and they baked a cake for me!
By then the issue had gotten big enough that the money did come
forth to do a transplant. I don’t remember if it was a special
appropriation or if Hickel got it, but National Guard aircraft were
used. They got the money to transplant a bunch of the musk oxen
from Nunivak Island to the Arctic Slope up near Nome. It was a
successful endeavor although it could have been done a lot easier
without all of the PR expense. So that’s the musk ox story.
After I retired from FWS, I wanted to work with my hands for
about a year and rebuilt part of the house. But then, I started
doing contract work. I was disturbed by the non-game program of
the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODF&W). It was
aimless. Somebody could issue a proposal, get a positive
response, and there were no objectives. I complained about this
and said that I’d like to write up a plan. The proposal didn’t go
anywhere for awhile. Finally, I spoke to Phil Snyder about it. He
had been one of the Commissioners for a long time. I told him
about the problem as I saw it. The next thing I knew the ODFW
Deputy Director called me in and told me that they wanted to go
ahead with drawing up a non-game plan. This was months later.
They said, “We want to prepare a set of goals and objectives and a
strategic plan” for the non-game program of Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife.
I did this and it was presented as a paper at the North American
National Wildlife Conference as the first of it’s kind. Later, we
updated it. I did status reports on potentially endangered or
threatened species. I did these partly for the Audubon Society of
Portland. One of them was on the Marbled Murrelet. Audubon
used it as a basis for the petition to list the Marbled Murrelet as a
threatened species, which did come about. I was pretty much
responsible for ODFW’s Species at Risk and all of their write-ups
on endangered species. I also did some work for commercial
firms; writing part of EISs on some projects like highway
widening and so forth. But the satisfaction really came from
doing contract work for the Audubon Society of Portland and
ODFW. I also taught an introductory course in wildlife
management at Portland State University for two terms. It filled
each time offered and at least two of my students became
professionals in the field.
Subsequently, I had a major health problem, which is why I’m so
short now; or shorter than I was. When I saw that I was going to
be okay, I started to work on this, Birds of Oregon: A General
Reference. I have been working on it for a couple of years now.
MR. GROVER: Did you intend that this book be a kind of follow
up to what Gabrielson did back in 1940?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. I kind of had it in the back of my mind,
starting back in 1940. I thought to myself, “This is going to have
to be redone some day”. I would have liked to have done it much
sooner, but there was never an opportunity where I could afford
the time and money to do it. This is a project that I have wanted to
do for a good part of my life.
MR. GROVER: The topic of Ira Gabrielson?
MR. MARSHALL: My contact with Ira Gabrielson started when I
was a baby in arms according to my father. I don’t remember him
as a child. But as history shows, he was Regional Director here,
for FWS or the Bureau of Biological Survey, I should say. At that
time most of the BBS work was devoted to predatory animal and
rodent control, refuges, and some research type activities. “Gabe”
was RD and prior to that he was in charge of rodent control.
Stanley Jewett was in charge of predatory animal control. Their
salaries weren’t much in those days, and Gabe was very much
interested in alpine plants. He put out a book, Alpine Flowers, and
he also had a nursery out near Powell Butte, which I have a
brochure for here somewhere. Here, he raised alpine plants for
gardens as kind of a sideline to supplement his meager salary. He
made his mark as being an excellent Regional Director. A lot of
this is in his memoirs. Ding Darling was of course the Director
appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. They brought Gabrielson back
to the Washington Office on a detail, so they said. But the detail
went on and on. Ding Darling called him in one day and
instructed him to report to his office. Gabe said he got there and
Ding Darling said, we’re going to see Harold Ickes”! Gabe said,
“I didn’t know what it was about!” He said that they went in there
and Ding Darling said that he wanted Gabe to be his successor.
“He knows all about this stuff, I don’t”. Gabe said that he was
speechless. He finally consented. Gabe told me how he regretted
the way things are done now. He said that Ickes told him that he
[Ickes] didn’t know anything about the fish and wildlife business
and that he wanted him to ‘just take care of it’. He said that if he
was to run into any problems to let him know, “but otherwise, it’s
yours”!
Gabe told me that there was no Assistant Secretary to deal with. If
he had to deal with anybody, he just went straight to Harold Ickes.
And he was free to deal with Congressmen. He said it was his to
run, and he just couldn’t get over the way it was when I was back
there. Our Director had to talk to the Assistant Secretary’s staff
19
and up through the Deputy Secretary and so forth. That’s what he
regretted most in terms of what has happened to FWS.
I really didn’t know Gabe as a child because he got transferred
out. He was active in the Audubon Society of Portland. I never
heard or saw much of him at all until he came to Malheur on some
kind of a visit. I told him who I was; Earl Marshall’s son. He
knew all about me, and he knew all about being friends with my
Dad. Then I didn’t run into him again until the GAO thing on the
Willamette Valley refuges. So again, I met him. Then when I got
accepted for the job in Washington, DC, he found out about it.
And like I said, I don’t know how he found out. That’s when he
made the phone call. But I remember one of my favorite things he
said to me when I got there; he was talking about the Presidential
election for Nixon. Maybe it’s out of turn to tell this because he
tried to be as non-partisan as possible. But he said, “It’s a hell of a
choice we had this time! We could vote for a crook, or a man that
didn’t have the executive ability to put together a wheel barrow
crew!” He was speaking of Nixon and McGovern.
He told me one day, “I knew all of the recent Presidents. I knew
Roosevelt real well. I knew Truman, and Eisenhower”. He went
on up the line to Nixon. He called him a ‘crook’ long before
Watergate. He said, “There’s only one of them that grew and that
was Truman. All of the rest of them just swelled”! Those are two
of the things I’ll always remember that Gabe told me. He seemed
to have a sense of what was going on all of the time. Watergate
was just starting to surface in the papers. He told me, “You just
wait! This is just the tip of the iceberg of what went on”! Sure
enough! I don’t know how he knew those things. He would go
into D.C. to the Cosmos Club, which he was a member of.
He gave me a lot of good advice. And living right near him for a
year and a half or so, I really got to know him. He didn’t want me
to knock on the door any more. It was too much trouble to get up.
But just hearing him tell about things in the political world and
how the Federal Aid Act got started and how they arrested Walter
P. Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation for a violation of the duck
hunting rules was interesting. Of course Chrysler appealed to
Roosevelt and Roosevelt backed Gabe up. He told me that this
was the beginning of game laws really meaning something. They
were no longer a joke. He sure kept up with things right up ‘til the
end.
MR. GROVER: Didn’t you tell me that he didn’t sleep much?
MR. MARSHALL: Oh yeah, that’s another part of the story. I
am glad you mentioned that, because he didn’t sleep much. He
was such a dynamic man and especially since he was heavy. He
was so energetic. But he liked to write. In his tours around the
country he only needed three or four hours of sleep a night, so
he’d write stories in hotel rooms. He had stories in all kinds of
sporting magazines that he wrote when he was Director, under a
pen name. The pen name was Spear, his wife’s maiden name. He
wrote hunting and fishing stories for magazines like Sports Afield
under this pen name. He also wrote a garden column for one of
the depression era magazines. He was a great gardener. He wrote
that under the pen name, “A. Amateur Farmer”. He had quite a
sense of humor and they were all humorous stories about what was
happening in his garden and how he got bit by the bees or one
thing and another. The bees got up his pants leg. Another one of
them was how a neighbor sold him some sting-less bees, and of
course how he found out that they weren’t sting-less. It was just
humor all of the time. When he was here in Portland he wrote for
the Oregon Motorist. One of the titles was “A Fat Man Climbs
Mount Hood”. He was a prolific writer, but so much of it wasn’t
under his real name. When he died, that stuff was in the house.
His nephew or grandson told me that this stuff had disappeared.
We don’t know what happened to it. His wife kept a scrapbook of
all of the things he wrote. These stories are not listed in his official
bibliography because he didn’t want it known that he wrote them.
MR. GROVER: But you have a copy of his diary?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, his memoirs, which were taken from his
diary. He excerpted his diary to write these things. This is what it
looks like. [Marshall shows Mr. Grover the book].
MR. GROVER: It’s fairly thick and one of those legal sized….
MR. MARSHALL: Well, it’s legal sized with reduced type. Two
8.5x11 pages typed double spaced are reproduced on legal sized
paper as two columns. There is one of those on deposit at the
Gabrielson Library at Patuxent. So I made them aware of that.
MR. GROVER: You have the only other one?
MR. MARSHALL: Well, I think maybe his family has another.
The Wildlife Management Institute has one also, I suspect.
Milt Reeves and I wrote a piece on him that was in published in
The Auk. I think I have a copy it around here somewhere. But
that’s about all I have to say on Gabrielson. There’s no use
duplicating what’s in his memoirs. A lot of it is in there; except
for a description of his personality; he had a great sense of humor
and tremendous energy. Oh, there it is! Shrubs, Bulbs, Alpines,
and Rare Native Pants in Oregon Gardens. This is the flyer from
his business, from 1937.
MR. GROVER: That was his old sideline to supplement his
meager Regional Director’s pay.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes! I think Tom McAllister had the original
of that. That’s kind of a little interesting piece about him.
Ira Gabrielson told me one day that they wanted to have a chief of
the Wildlife Refuge System and they had picked the “best damned
aquatic biologist they could find”! It was J. Clark Salyer. Salyer
was shaped something like a pear. He was huge. And he always
ordered two meals at a restaurant; two helpings, not just one. But
he was also diabetic and ignored it. And he had tremendous
energy. He was a blonde, big guy, like I said. He didn’t like to
fly. So he would drive all over the country in his big black
government Buick. He would drive at night and visit refuges and
potential refuges during the day. They told me to do this too. I
could tell about that. That was his routine. He thought nothing of
testifying before Congress. He would completely bypass the
Director. They’d call him to testify on something, or he’d arrange
it so they’d call him. He was just a tremendous person in terms of
promoting refuges.
20
He was extremely knowledgeable and to me his mind was just like
a photograph. He wouldn’t forget where he had been and could
describe things in detail. He had this tremendous energy.
McDonald thought the world of him although Salyer didn’t think
that much of Mac. I know this because Mac was so fastidious. I
have to tell a story about the personalities of Kenneth McDonald
and Salyer. The Manager at the Charles M. Russell Wildlife
Range in Montana was a very fastidious guy too. This could be a
very dusty place. The Refuge Manager and Salyer were using
McDonald’s car. Salyer found out it was McDonald’s car and he
told the Refuge Manager, “That gives me an idea”! He hung
sagebrush from it and got it as dirty as he could possibly get it.
And the Refuge Manager kept saying, “I don’t think this is a good
idea, Mr. Salyer”! But it showed the personalities of the two. Of
course they took Mac’s car back all dirty and covered with dust.
Salyer was always kind of knocking him down for that.
Salyer just had such tremendous knowledge about the refuges and
a grasp of everything on them. He could remember the smallest of
details. He embarrassed me one day back in Washington. He
started asking me about whether or not the spike rush was still
growing on a certain unit on the Sutter Refuge in California. I
didn’t remember whether it was still there or not. It was
embarrassing, the things he would ask about; little details about
something on a given refuge.
One of my last experiences in the field with him was when he
wanted to look at Deer Island. It is on the lower Columbia here,
near St. Helen’s. He had always thought about it as a refuge. He
was here for a meeting and he said, “I want to go look at Deer
Island”. They sent me and Howard Sergeant, the head of the
Realty Division to go with him. We got to the road, it was a little
narrow road, that goes into the island across a dike. There was a
big sign, “No Trespassing-Private Property”. We went in there
anyway, being Salyer. We looked Deer Island over. And we ran
into a man who I found out later was the owner. I subsequently
got to know the owner’s son. When we ran into this guy, of
course he wanted to know what we were doing there. Salyer said,
“We’re looking at the dikes. We’re from the Corps of Engineers
and we’re checking the dikes down here!” That was fine with the
owner of course. Then Salyer said to the guy standing there,
“Well boys, we’d better get back to Astoria.”
We were no more going to Astoria than we were going to Berlin!
But he could lie himself out of the pickles that he’d get himself
into! He told me one day, “My personnel folder is full of
reprimands and it will hold a whole lot more!” He was quite a
character. It’s too bad that he died at quite an early age from not
taking care of his diabetes. He became blind. He’d go around the
Interior Building with a map tube for a cane because he didn’t like
to admit he was blind. It was kind of sad. I’m not sure what
happened, but one day, when I was back there on a detail,
something had happened in the Director’s office, which related to
a political decision. Salyer came marching into the office I was in
saying, “Isn’t this a pissy ass outfit? It doesn’t have the guts of a
drunken cockroach!” I really enjoyed that man, and knowing
him.
MR. GROVER: Whom else do you think we should be
interviewing?
MR. MARSHALL: Well certainly Ray Erickson, who lives in
Salem. And he’s in his eighties. He needs to be interviewed.
MR. GROVER: You mentioned Kahler.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, Kahler Martinson. Erickson’s not in
Portland Retiree’s Directory. He left Region 1 in 1955. I didn’t
see his name in there.
MRS. GROVER: That’s not a name I remember. You were
talking about Vernon Ekedahl and Ray Glahn.
MR. GROVER: And there’s Gene Kridler.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, Gene is on your list. Here’s Ray
Erickson’s address and phone number. Ekedahl ended up as
Supervisor of Refuges here following Mac Donald’s retirement.
He was one of those guys who had no education beyond high
school. I worked under him on the Sacramento Refuge initially.
He’s in his nineties. His address is here. I correspond with him a
little. I do have his son’s email address too. I don’t know if it
would be worthwhile to talk to him. He’s getting forgetful…he
loves to talk about old times and he is so disapproving of anything
in the FWS now, because they are not doing it the way they did it
in ‘the good old days’. ‘They’ve got all of these people standing
around with nothing to do!’ He goes to Sacramento Refuge. He
stops there and lectures the guys on all of the things they’re doing
wrong, and about how they are not getting any rice planted or
doing any work. Every time I talk to Vernon, or he writes me a
letter, that’s what I hear. So I don’t know. He worked in refuges
in Montana in the late 1930’s and 1940’s in World War II. He has
moved to be with his son in Colorado.
There is also Phil Lahenbauer.
MR. GROVER: Was he a Refuge type?
MR. MARSHALL: He was in Endangered Species and Refuges.
Then there is friend, Dave Lenhart, who was in Pesticides.
MRS. GROVER: Yeah, Dave and Judy are pretty regular at the
luncheon things.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, at the last ones I went to. You might
consider Milt Reeves. He never worked in this region but he lives
out here now out at Amity.
MR. GROVER: Is he growing grapes or something?
MR. MARSHALL: No, he is making furniture out of chestnut.
Milt and his wife are very active in local political matters. He’s a
friend of Larry DeBates. He lives within a half a mile of Larry. I
think he would be worth talking to. Bob Russell is up there at
Sequim. I understand he is in poor health now. He went in to
refuges just before I did.
MR. GROVER: I want to thank you Dave, for y

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THE U.S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE
R EE T II R EE D
PPaacciiffiicc RReeggiioonn
Check out the Fish & Wildlife Service Retirees Website: www .nctc.fws.gov/history/heritagecommittee.html
ORAL HISTORY
of
David B. Marshall
Portland, Oregon
November 30, 2000
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID B. MARSHALL
BY JERRY C. GROVER
and Judy M. Grover
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Retired
PORTLAND, OREGON
MR. GROVER: I am with David B. Marshall, a long time
employee of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Can you give us
a little of your background and history? When were you born?
MR. MARSHALL: I was born on March 7, 1926 in Portland,
Oregon into a pioneer Oregon family, at least on my father’s
side and to some extent on my mother’s side. I had an early
interest in birds; no doubt through my family. My family was
composed of a number of naturalists including my great
grandmother who was a close friend of William L. Finley, the
famous Oregon conservationist, wildlife photographer, writer
and naturalist. So I developed an interest in birds. Some of my
earliest memories are identifying birds in the backyard at the
feeder. I learned their names from my mother and father. My
father and his family were very active in what was then called
the Oregon Audubon Society, now Audubon Society of
Portland. As a result of exposure to activities and members of
this group, I had further exposure to things in the natural history
world. My parents were particularly interested in wildflowers.
But that didn’t interest me at the time. It was just birds.
MR. GROVER: What did your father do?
MR. MARSHALL: My father was a Civil Engineer and a
Surveyor. He and his brother had an engineering firm here in
Portland and did a good part of the lot survey work and
subdivision work in Portland, starting in the teens up until the
mid 1950s. Also they conducted engineering work during
World War II designing the docks at the shipyards and laying
out housing projects. During the depression my dad was County
Surveyor for a short time when business slacked off. This was
an elected position. I also had the opportunity to get in the out
of doors on numerous family outings and camping trips.
Camping wasn’t popular then, but we did a lot of it over
various parts of the state.
MR. GROVER: That would have been in the 1930s?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, the 1930s and early 1940s. We really
got around, particularly in southeast Oregon including Steens
Mountain. Then it was tough getting around. Many a time we
were delayed for a day or two because storm flooded the roads.
Those family trips meant a lot. Then there was the exposure to
things like the Audubon Society lectures, which were weekly.
My dad was the chairman of the programs.
MR. GROVER: Was this the Oregon Audubon Society?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, it was then called the Oregon
Audubon Society. It was the only one in the state. There were
the Christmas bird counts, which were important to me.
Audubon activities brought me into contact with William L.
Finley and Stanley G. Jewett and a number of other famous
people like Ed Averill. So I had this contact as a boy,
particularly with Finley and Jewett, which meant a lot to me. I
was impressed with the things they were doing from a
conservation standpoint. I would overhear them talking over
conservation problems and their strategies and what they should
do about various issues. Finley and his wife, Irene, came to
some family Christmas celebrations. I got to listen to Finley’s
lectures. One that I can most vividly remember was on the
California condor. That inspired me in terms of the need to
protect endangered species. Another event that got me
interested in endangered species was this; in 1937 we were at
2
Borax Lake east of Steens Mountain, OR. We looked down at
the fish in the lake and my father told me, “That fish does not
have a name, and this is the only place that it is found in the
world”. Somehow, that really got to me. I picked up a lot of
interest then. This fish didn’t have a name and this was the only
place in the world where it was found. The only way my father
knew about that was through his association with Carl Hubbs.
MR. GROVER: Was that Carl Hubbs of Hubbs and Lagler
fame?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes! Hubbs had told him about it. He told
him that the fish hadn’t been described at that point.
Incidentally, the fish did not get described until the late 1960s or
early 1970s and is now referred to as the Borax Lake chub. I
made sure it got listed under the ESA when I was with that
program. So, I had an association with natural history in
boyhood. Then I met two boys, Tom McAllister and William
Telfer, who were about my age. We became close friends. I
had a bicycle and saw to it that they got bicycles and we
bicycled all over the Portland area on bird watching trips. And
we contributed to work that was done to document birds of the
Portland area, what seasons they were there and where. We
contributed a lot to that. Our adventures just came out in print
in Wild in the City by Houck and Cody published by Oregon
Historical Society Press. In it is a story titled “Home Town”
which Tom McAllister and I wrote. The story was also
published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in the Fall 2000
issue. That tells a little bit about our adventures. We rode our
bikes to Mount Hood. At one point we even bicycled to Olallie
Lake, OR. This was in the early 1940s. We also bicycled out
towards Maupin about 100 miles from home to see birds of
eastern Oregon. These were bicycle/camping trips. At that time
you could bicycle from here to Government Camp and you’d
have to get off of the road maybe every fifteen or twenty
minutes to let a car by; nothing like the traffic of today. The
pavement wasn’t really wide enough to accommodate a car and
a bicycle too. These experiences gave us a lot of self confidence
and independence.
MR. GROVER: Did you have any jobs at this time? I know it
takes a little money to go out to Olallie Lake. Did you ever
work for pay?
MR. MARSHALL: No, I didn’t until I was 16. Well, I had a
family allowance if I cut the lawn and did little chores like that.
But I remember that to get my bicycle, I had to pay half of it. If
I could save up enough money for half of it, my father would
pay for the other half. These bicycle trips added a lot to my life.
In 1939, when I was 13 years old, Oregon Audubon conducted a
week’s auto trip to Malheur Refuge. My dad’s brother, C. L.
Marshall, set up the logistics for it. But the real leader from a
technical standpoint was Stanley G. Jewett, who was called the
Regional Biologist for what was then the U.S. Biological
Survey. Jewett was co-author with Ira Gabrielson of Birds of
Oregon, which was published in 1940. Jewett took quite an
interest in me as a boy. He would go over our bird notes from
our various trips. We would call him with questions about
birds. We didn’t really have good field guides then. He would
usually say, “You come down to my office.” We’d do down
there and we’d discuss things that we had seen. But the trip to
Malheur really told me that I wanted to be like Jewett, a wildlife
biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was kind of
headed that way. He advised Tom McAllister and me to get
summer jobs outdoors just as soon as we could even if it was
building trails; this would help lead to careers. When we were
still in our last year of high school the Forest Service recruited
youth for fire control and work crews as well as forest fire
lookouts. Physically fit older young men were in the military.
This was in 1943. Tom McAllister and I both applied and we
got put on the Fremont National Forest. About July 1, at the
beginning of the fire season, both of us were put on fire lookout
stations on peaks. We were seventeen years old. At that point
there were no tourists, and no pleasure travel because of the war.
There was gas rationing. We were put up there alone with no
contact with the outside world except by telephone connected to
the nearest ranger station. Tom was put on Hager Mountain
near Silver Lake and I was on one called Colman Point near
Bly. We kept bird notes of course and that led to an article in
The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union,
titled “Summer Birds of the Fremont National Forest, Oregon.”
We thus published in a professional journal before we’d ever
gone to college. Jewett encouraged us to do this and went over
it before we sent it in. He said that it was fine. It was published
in the April 1945 edition.
In 1944, after high school graduation, the war wasn’t over. I
went into the army air forces. I became an aerial gunner on a B-
17. My position was as the “belly” gunner otherwise known as
the ball turret. I flew four combat missions over Germany and
the war in Europe ended. Then in 1946, I was out of the
military and entered Oregon State College where I majored in
what was then called Fish and Game Management. Tom
McAllister did likewise. We were right away pegged as being
‘different’ because the class, which was all war veterans but
one, and all men of course, enrolled in the major because of an
interest in hunting and fishing. We were the first post-war class
at Oregon State in Fish and Game Management. Tom and I
picked Oregon State because it was one of only two or three
schools that offered a major in that field on the west coast. It
was a really good curriculum. We turned out to be well
prepared for professional positions, even though not one of our
major instructors had a Ph.D. They really worked hard on a
curriculum that would fit what was needed for us. Some of the
classes such as ornithology and mammalogy, I see most people
taking now as graduate students. The agencies at that point
badly needed trained people. It was a case of just getting them
out just as fast as they could. We really weren’t encouraged to
go to graduate school at all.
The summer after I got out of the military, I worked again for
the Forest Service on the Fremont National Forest as a fire
lookout. The summer between my freshman and sophomore
year at OSU I did likewise. Between my sophomore and junior
year, I worked for the National Park Service at Crater Lake
National Park. I wanted to vary my experience, but I was
simply one of those rangers at the gate who pulled in the fees. I
wanted to be a ranger/naturalist, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
They said I didn’t have enough college yet. But I ended up on
the side helping Don Farner, who wrote The Birds of Crater
3
Lake National Park. I wanted to get into the FWS and saw that
I had better head that way. So in about January of 1949 I went
to see Stan Jewett and asked him, “How do I get in to the
FWS”? It was the usual answer, “You come down to my
office”. That was when I was junior at Oregon State. He told
me I should apply for a Student Assistant position and
introduced me to Kenneth F. MacDonald (known as “Mac”),
the regional refuge supervisor (The Portland Regional Office at
that time had the states of WA, OR, CA, ID, NV and MT
assigned to it). They had Student Assistant positions at the Tule
Lake and Malheur Refuges and were going to establish one on
the Stillwater Wildlife Management Area. So I applied and
nothing happened. So I called Jewett again and said, “What do I
do?” He said, “You come down to my office.” I went down
there and he marched me back to see Kenneth McDonald again.
Jewett, I found out, wasn’t too well liked by some of his peers
because of his bluntness. He said, “Mac, do you have this boy a
job or don’t you have a job for him?” Mac kind of chewed
away on his cigar, and grumbled like he did. Finally he said he
did have a job for me. Then Jewett, who was not with refuges
but served as the flyway biologist at that point, told Mac that he
wanted him to put me at Stillwater. Of course, that didn’t set to
good with Mac either.
MR. GROVER: Who was Mac again?
MR. MARSHALL: Mac was the Refuge Supervisor in
Portland. He was a Scotsman who had no biological training
whatsoever. He came to the service from Montana where he
had been in charge of state hatcheries, but he had no formal
training in fish and wildlife. But in many ways he was a good
administrator. Anyway, this was all kind of innocent on my
part. It was all because of who I knew that I got into the FWS.
There was no good formal review of applicants or advertising. I
don’t think it was proper, but that’s what happened. I wanted to
know how I could get in, and Jewett told me to come down to
his office! He was determined that I go to Stillwater. He said it
was a new area. He told Mac that we had virtually no
information on it - no real idea of what the bird or plant life
there. Jewett told Mac, “This is the man who can do it!” This
probably happened in April. In June upon termination of spring
term, I drove to Fallon, Nevada, the headquarters of the
Stillwater Wildlife Management Area, and met Tom Horn, the
Refuge Manager, at his home on an afternoon in early June of
1949. He had arrived on the site with his family several weeks
previously. I believe there might have been one maintenance
man. I drove down there in a surplus World War II jeep that I
had. Tom Horn must have taken a liking to me because I just
talked to him for an hour or two, and he said, “Well, do you see
that jeep over there?” It was a new jeep pickup truck. He said,
“That’s yours for the summer. I want you to inventory
everything that’s here. All the bird and mammal life, plants and
so forth.”
I became very fond of Tom’s family. In fact, I wasn’t there but
for an hour or two when he sent me with his daughter, Nancy,
who was about eight and knew the way to the refuge. She
guided me out there and showed me a piece of it and we came
back to town. The summer turned into a great experience
because I was given a free hand and wrote a report on the area at
the end of the summer. I still have a copy of that report.
During the course of the summer, J. Clark Salyer showed up
with Mac. Salyer was national Chief of the Wildlife Refuge
System. He was an extremely colorful and competent character.
Salyer came to determine what part of this refuge was going to
left open to public hunting. It was a 205,000-acre area of which
we had jurisdiction over about 155,000 acres through an
agreement with the Nevada Fish and Game Commission, the
Truckee-Carson Irrigation District and the FWS. Most of it was
to become open to public hunting. Salyer came to talk to the
local people about what part of the area would be open to public
hunting and what wouldn’t. This is a really interesting piece of
history. He and Mac went on a tour of the refuge with Tom
Horn. They borrowed my jeep pickup that day. It was the only
vehicle with 4-wheel drive, which was essential. There were
almost no roads. Mac was a very fastidious man who didn’t like
a bit of dust or dirt. In the front of the pickup there was just
room for Tom Horn and Salyer. I didn’t get to go because there
wasn’t enough room. But Mac had to sit on a box in the back of
the pickup in all of the dust. Of course, Salyer outranked him
and Tom Horn had to drive! Besides, Salyer delighted in
teasing Mac about his not wanting to get dirty. They had a
meeting that night with the local sportsmen. Salyer drew a line
across the map. He said, “Okay boys, which side do you want?”
This was in reference to which side of the line they wanted for
hunting and which side did they wanted to be closed to hunting.
They were furious because they had been sold on the idea that
they could break it all up into little units and have a little piece
here and a little piece there for refuge and so forth. That didn’t
go over at all. But the map they had of the refuge didn’t have
half of the wetlands delineated at the north end of the area.
There was no good map. I discovered all kinds of marvelous
habitat that wasn’t on the map at all. In fact the map showed
about a third of the wetlands on the area. The local sportsmen
could see that. When Salyer drew that line which looked like an
even split to him, they naturally picked the good half, which had
all of these marvelous wetlands for waterfowl habitat that were
not on the map.
MR. GROVER: They wanted this part as their hunting area?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, it was to be the hunting area. So they
came out way, way ahead in terms of the hunting area. That
was an interesting experience in how things came about at that
time. But that’s also how I got to come into the service on a
permanent basis. Before that meeting, and after Salyer’s tour of
the area, I walked into the office. It was around 5:30 in the
evening. I came to town for some reason, probably to pick up
the jeep truck. Tom Horn was in the office along with Salyer.
Salyer was standing there in his under shorts. He was changing
his clothes for the meeting. Tom said, “Dave, meet J. Clark
Salyer”! Well I shook hands with Salyer standing there in his
under shorts! Then, Salyer said…he had kind of a funny way of
talking: “How about coming to work for us permanently?”
What brought that on I have no idea. Tom insisted he did not
say anything about me. But I still wonder! But that’s what he
said. I told him, “Yes, I’d like to”. He then said, “Okay, do you
have a girlfriend?” I told him that I did and we were planning
4
on getting married at the end of the summer. Salyer told me to
get Tom to give me three days of leave to go up to Oregon, get
my girlfriend, marry her and bring her back here. He said, “I
want to see what she thinks of this place”. At that time I later
learned, they were very concerned that employees be married
because they were in isolated places and unmarried men didn’t
seem to stay in one place or work long hours, as was customary
then. So in August, I did go home for several days. Betty and I
got married and we drove back down there. We stayed at the
Canvasback Gun Club where I was housed. That took care of
that necessary requirement I guess, in Salyer’s eyes. But like I
said, I guess he really did want to see what Betty thought of the
place because Fallon, Nevada was a pretty isolated area for a lot
of women, I can assure you. So I was back at Stillwater as an
Assistant Refuge Manager beginning in March of 1950 after I
completed the necessary requirements for my B.S. degree from
Oregon State College.
MR. GROVER: So Dave, this was in a permanent position?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, this was my first permanent
assignment.
MR. GROVER: So you arrived back there with a wife and….
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and a pregnant wife at that, by then!
But as soon as I had enough credits at Oregon State, which was
in March, I just left. The last courses in the last term didn’t look
too interesting to me. One of them was in big game
management and I wasn’t too interested in that particularly. So
we moved down there in March. The paper said I was Assistant
Refuge Manager, GS-5. But there was also a biologist assigned
there at that time. Tom Horn was not too crazy about him and
he wanted me to be the biologist, so he put the fellow that was
the biologist who had quite a bit of experience, on
administrative duties and I was really the biologist. I felt bad
about that. He was LeRoy Giles. He was really a very
competent guy. We got along great despite what Tom did.
I’d like to back up to one point.
MR. MARSHALL: MacDonald was Supervisor of Refuges in
Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana.
And he had one Assistant who was good at administrative work.
He name was Wilfred Anderson. He went from being a clerk at
Malheur to being an assistant to MacDonald. The Regional
office staff was two people, plus secretarial help. That’s all
there was. And MacDonald was supervisor then for the Refuge
Managers in those various states. You can see how many
people he had to supervise. You can also see what freedom they
must have had because Mac couldn’t watch over them that
closely.
MR. GROVER: Do you recollect how many refuges there
were, staffed refuges, in this area?
MR. MARSHALL: Well, I would judge about 30 that were
manned plus satellites.
MR. GROVER: How were they typically manned?
MR. MARSHALL: Typically, they were manned by a Refuge
Manager. On the big ones, also by an Assistant Refuge
Manager and several maintenance men and a clerk. That was
the typical staffing. Some of them only had one man on them.
Some of them had two. The big ones like Malheur would have
maybe ten. They were mostly maintenance people.
MR. GROVER: Okay, back to Stillwater. Here you are with a
pregnant wife back at Stillwater. What was your first
assignment there as a permanent employee, living the good life
as a GS-5?
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, my salary was $3,200.00 a year!
That was gross! But my rent was only $40.00 a month. One of
the things they wanted me to do was to work up a grazing plan
for the refuge. The understanding was that with the FWS taking
this over we would regulate the grazing and the money from the
grazing would go to the Truckee Carson Irrigation District. As
it was, there were a dozen or so cattle operators who were
getting free grazing on 155,000 acres. They weren’t paying a
dime for it and of course they were pretty bitter that suddenly
they were going to have to be charged for their grazing. In fact,
the Pelican Island area of the refuge had about a hundred horses
on it, loose. Nobody claimed them of course until they were
impounded. We had a real PR problem. I remember one of my
interesting experiences was going out towards the Pelican Island
area on a very sandy road, which required everything my truck
had. The sand had clay put on it that was just wide enough for a
vehicle to get over the sand dunes. I got about half way down
this a one-way road and met a rancher named Francis Erb
coming the other way. I was blocked from going anywhere. I
had to spend about two hours there with him being lectured on
the ills of the government and how terrible the government was
and how we had no right to come in there and charge him
grazing fees. So I began to get the flavor of the ranchers at that
point, as a very young person. Eventually we did get a grazing
plan but it took a long, long time to bring those people around to
the idea that they would have to pay, get their cattle counted and
so forth.
I continued with waterfowl inventory work on the weekly
censuses we were required to do then. Then, we started making
periodic trips to Anaho Island Refuge in Pyramid Lake to
inventory the pelican, tern and gull colonies there. I remember
my first trip out there; LeRoy Giles went along. I was very
nervous. We had to take off from Sutcliff to go to the island.
Pyramid Lake is very subject to high winds suddenly coming up
and creating high waves. We had a twelve-foot aluminum boat
with a ten-horse power motor. There was no spare motor. I
never felt very comfortable about it, if the motor went out or the
wind came up. I eventually found I could launch the boat from
a point on the mainland that was much closer to the island.
Anaho trips constituted great experiences. I did a lot of bird
photography out there. Giles and I ended up writing an article
on the birds of Anaho Island which was published in the Auk,
the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union.
The engineering people were very strong and had a lot of
influence at that time - more influence than biologists. They
wanted to build extensive systems of dikes and water control
5
structures on refuges. Their big pitch was that they could make
these impoundments permanent water so ducks could have
water year round. What they did not understand, which I got to
understand so well, was that permanent water areas were not
good waterfowl habitat. It was seasonal water areas that were. I
had a very difficult time putting this across. It was so obvious at
Stillwater. Food plants grew in areas that were subject to
periodic drying. That was a reality… I was not popular for my
position on that at all! Mac and the Regional Director were very
influenced by the engineers; and did not put much stake in a
“youngster” like me. This was most unfortunate. It was a
frustrating thing to me.
MR. GROVER: Were the engineers here in Portland, or were
you using Reclamation engineers?
MR. MARSHALL: No, they were here in Portland. They
would come to the refuges periodically and all they could think
about was establishing permanent water. I’d write my reports
that said, no, this wasn’t going to work. Permanent water is the
poorest waterfowl habitat. That was a big thing with me; trying
to overcome that.
One of my most interesting assignments there was in the
anthropology field. There were Paiute Indians around, and a
Paiute Indian Reservation. An amateur archeologist/
anthropologist named Margaret Wheat lived in the area. She
realized that we had in the area an elderly Paiute Indian lady
named Wuzzie George who had lived in the Stillwater marsh in
her childhood under primitive, original conditions. Her father
and her parents wanted nothing to do with white people and they
lived out there under pre-Euro-American settlement conditions.
Wuzzie was a “gold mine” of information on how those people
lived. I was brought onto this scene by Margaret Wheat.
Wuzzie had a friend named Alice Steve who did live with white
people as a little girl. Alice was important in that she convinced
Wuzzie to tell us about how they lived. Wuzzie, through a
number of interviews that were taped, eventually spilled out
how she and her family lived and how they used the fisheries,
wildlife and plants of the marsh. We made fieldtrips out there
with her and went to her original home areas. It was real
revelation to me and one of the most exciting things in my life
because I realized that Wuzzie George knew far more about
plants and animals of the area than I did. She was a remarkable
woman and enjoyed watching birds. All of this was taped for
the Nevada State Museum. It was summarized and published by
the Univ. of Nevada Press under the title of Survival Arts of the
Primitive Paiutes by Margaret M. Wheat. Part of her work was
used later by anthropologists in the archeological surveys at
Stillwater, which they called me back for because of my
knowledge of Wuzzie George.
MR. GROVER: There was a book that was written a couple of
years ago which ended up on the market that the Stillwater
Refuge was a central part to. Did you have a part in developing
that?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, you are thinking of Catherine S.
Fowler’s book titled In the Shadow of Fox Peak, published in
1992 by the Service. Before its publication, the refuge had me
come down to discuss with Fowler my experiences with Wuzzie
George. It is an excellent book which, incidentally, contains a
number of my photographs. Other books resulting from this
work included People of the Marsh: A Cultural and Natural
History of Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge by Kendal Morris
and Anan W. Raymond or Who Were the Ancient People of
Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada? by Raymond and
Morris. Both were published by FWS. I did not contribute to
the writing of these books, but some of the photographs in them
were taken by me.
MR. MARSHALL: I was somewhat disappointed with
Margaret M. Wheat’s book. The publisher popularized it and
took out all of the scientific names of the plants, which was too
bad. One of my roles in this was to identify the plants the
Paiutes used. They would give their name and use for a plant
and I would give the Latin name so we’d be sure which plant we
were taking about. They took that out of the book. As far as I
know all of the tapes are in the Nevada State Museum. It was a
marvelous experience for me because I just couldn’t get over the
way those people lived and the knowledge they had of natural
history and even geology. It was just a great thing to learn
about. That was one of my most interesting of my life’s
assignments.
Another thing that went on, which I think was a terrible mistake
in some ways, was …the local people were very interested in
goose hunting. We had a population of Canada geese, which
was only about twenty-five or so birds. Salyer said that he’d
take care of that. He’d get some muskrats in there to build
houses. The local muskrat subspecies was a bank dweller.
They didn’t build houses. LeRoy Giles transplanted
approximately a thousand muskrats from the Tule Lake Refuge
to Stillwater. I think those muskrats originally came from the
Great Lakes. The Tule Lake muskrats reproduced like crazy
and built large houses all over the place, using the dense stands
of cattail and bulrush for material. And yes, we did build the
goose population way up. And in so doing, I suspect we
eliminated a subspecies of muskrat, which I assume is extinct.
This was the burrowing muskrat, which had been native to
central Nevada. Unless there is some isolated marsh in Nevada
that has some, I don’t know of it. The FWS eliminated a
muskrat taxon at that point. This did get Ray Alcorn, a local
mammalogist/ornitologist somewhat upset. That’s something
that has not been adequately documented or written up.
Backing up a little bit; I forgot to mention during my first
summer at Stillwater I was detailed to Tule Lake for about 10
days. They had hundreds of thousands of ducks die there from
botulism in 1949 on the adjoining Lower Klamath Refuge. I
was detailed there with Leroy Giles to work on that botulism
situation by picking sick ducks up and running them through a
hospital. They were given an antitoxin and fresh water. The
Refuge Manager at Tule Lake in 1949 was a man named
Howard Sergeant. Howard pulled me off the botulism detail
part of the time. I got to go around the Klamath Basin refuges
6
with him and observe. He seemed interested in teaching me all
he could about management of this large refuge complex.
Going back to my permanent assignment…let’s see, I
mentioned the Indians. Oh yeah, I wanted to mention that at the
best I can figure at this point, we had five refuge biologists in
the field on the refuges in the Region at that time. I can tell you
how many refuges there were if I look at the list and check those
off. But there were only five field biologists on the refuges
themselves that I can recall.
MR. GROVER: The definition of a field biologist was one with
a college degree?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and supposedly was doing biological
work rather than building fences or something like that.
MR. GROVER: Were the Refuge Managers and Assistant
Refuge Managers degreed people?
MR. MARSHALL: Generally not in the 1950s. I wanted to
mention that. I think I’ve got it written down for a little later in
my list of frustrations.
MR. GROVER: Okay, we can wait and get to it. Let’s go on to
your next career stage and transfer.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, my transfer to Sacramento NWR.
That was in November of 1953. At that time the State of
California’s Department of Fish and Game was very strong.
They were unhappy because no part of the 10,000 acre
Sacramento NWR was open to public hunting. They were
really putting pressure on for the FWS to open 40% of that
refuge to public hunting, which would have been a mistake
because it would have concentrated the birds even more in
closed areas. But J. Clark Salyer got the idea that maybe we
could find Ross’s geese there. Ross’s geese at that point were
considered very rare. If Ross’s geese were wintering there, then
there would be every reason not to open any of it to hunting. So
they sent me to Sacramento. I was the first full-time biologist
there. My first priority was of course to find Ross’s geese on
the Sacramento Refuge. I didn’t find them there!
MR. GROVER: What grade were you then?
MR. MARSHALL: I had become a GS-7 after my first year of
permanent employment at Stillwater. The Sacramento Refuge
Manager had no college training and he was very sensitive
about that. His name was Vernon Ekedahl. He was Montana
farmer who became a maintenance man and later Manager of
Bowdoin Refuge. He was a very competent farmer and
manager. But he felt very inadequate, especially around me. I
did convince him I was okay, I guess. I couldn’t tell him what
to do, but I could show him! I got along with Vernon fine, and
he left me alone on the Ross’s goose thing. That was way
beyond him. I couldn’t even get as much as a spotting scope out
of him, which I desperately needed to try and tell Ross’s geese
from snow geese in the field. This went on for months before I
finally got a spotting scope. Ray Erickson, Biologist for
Malheur, helped with this project. We managed to get a couple
of Ross’s geese that were winged by hunters. It was against
regulations to shoot Ross’s geese. But hunters couldn’t tell
them from snow geese. We put the crippled Ross’s geese in a
pen with crippled snow geese. In that way we figured out how
to separate them at a distance. I didn’t find any Ross geese on
the refuge, but I’d go around to the picking plants. The duck
hunters then would take their birds to processing plants that
would pick them. I would go around to the picking plants and
try and get an idea of how many Ross’s geese there were as
opposed to snow geese. Of course the picking plant operators
first thought I was law enforcement and was going to arrest
people for shooting Ross’s geese. I managed to convince them
that I wasn’t interested in that. I would find Ross’s geese at the
picking plants but I wouldn’t say anything. I started to get an
idea of how many there were, and then I befriended a big duck
club in the Butte Sink. They understood that I was okay. So I
began to get an idea of the number of Ross geese that were
taken. I didn’t find many initially. Eventually, I got into the
San Joaquin Valley and discovered that this is where most of
them wintered. I managed to figure out how to inventory them
there by air.
MR. GROVER: Was this on the Merced Refuge?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, Merced is in that general area; the
grasslands. It was partly the way they flew, and partly the way
they associated with cackling geese rather than other snow geese
that I managed to inventory them. Gene Kridler, who replaced
me, and I wrote all the Ross’s geese stuff up. I wanted to put it
in a scientific journal, but the Regional office grabbed a hold of
the report and they didn’t want it published. That made Gene
and me kind of bitter.
MR. GROVER: Why didn’t they want it published?
MR. MARSHALL: We were critical of some things that were
going on, as for example the meaningless closure on Ross’s
geese hunting. I think that’s part of the reason. Richard Griffith
was the one. He said he’d straighten it out, but he never did.
MR. GROVER: He was RD at the time?
MR. MARSHALL: He was Assistant RD for Wildlife. Rice
growing then was a big thing on those refuges. There were
three federal refuges; Sacramento, Colusa and Sutter. The
number of birds there was tremendous. There was also a State
area, Gray Lodge. I wish we could put this on the tape but these
pictures will give you an idea of the concentrations of waterfowl
that were involved at that time, which were confined to very
small areas that were closed to hunting. The reason we didn’t
want to see more areas opened to hunting was because they
were just packed in there in poultry pen-like conditions. Rice
was grown on the refuges by the FWS and Vernon Ekedahl was,
like I said, a great farmer. The birds completely consumed the
rice crops, but I was concerned that Vernon didn’t want to
recognize ducks as eating anything but rice. So I started a study
by going around to hunters and offering to clean their ducks if I
could have the crops and the gizzards. Eventually, I did get
quite an assemblage showing that the ducks were eating a lot of
things besides rice. Vernon would come by my desk and see the
7
contents of the gizzards and then he began to get the picture that
it was important to grow some of the wild food plants too.
Since then, the refuges have quit growing rice, and there is more
refuge area now. When we did have the ducks concentrated like
that you had to have as big a volume of feed as you could
produce, and at that point in time it involved rice.
MR. GROVER: Where they using the statistic that about
seventy percent of the Pacific Flyway birds funneled through the
Sacramento Refuge?
MR. MARSHALL: The Sacramento Valley, but not all were
there at the same time; many went on to the San Joaquin Valley.
MR. GROVER: The Sacramento Valley had a sizable portion
of them. That was a hell of a lot of birds!
MR. MARSHALL: That’s right! It was seventy percent of ten
million or more birds! I know for a while there we were
completely underestimating how many birds there were. I did
surveys mostly by air with Ray Glahn, a pilot biologist with the
Service. He had a FWS plane at that time, a Piper Super Cub. I
found I was grossly underestimating waterfowl numbers. I
discovered this by taking pictures with my own camera, and
then sample counting the ducks and geese on the pictures.
California Fish and Game had at that point a two-engine
Beachcraft aircraft with a big mounted surplus aerial camera in
the plane’s belly. They started sampling by air during the
winter inventory and we really got a much better handle on what
the populations were.
MR. GROVER: Was your relationship with the State at that
time good? Were they sharing the pictures with you?
MR. MARSHALL: Our relationship in the biological field was
good. Our relationship at the administrative level was terrible.
It was frightfully bad. And that brings up a real good point in
that there was tremendous rivalry between the state and the feds
then, which was most unfortunate. Salyer was a part of that.
MacDonald was a part of that. It was things like; if you’re
looking at an area for a new refuge, well, don’t tell the state,
they might want it too. It was terrible and it irritated me
because there were so many things to be done that we could
work together on. John Chattin who was the flyway biologist
had a good relationship with California; he worked for them at
one time. In the biological field we had no problems and
assisted each other. But at the administrative level it was really
bad. And it wasn’t just California and Nevada, it was with other
states. It was uncalled for, and I blame a lot of our own people
for that.
Another aspect of this thing was refuge visitors. People like
Ekedahl just didn’t like the public coming on the refuge. He
discouraged any kind of public use. A number of Refuge
Managers were like that. They thought that people would
disturb the birds and we should just keep them out. I was
against that policy and wanted to bring people in. There were
groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club that
wanted to tour and observe birds on the refuge. The answer
from Ekedahl was a reluctant, ‘well, yeah, if you go along, you
can take them out there.’ I did some of that. Then we had a
meeting in Portland with all of the managers and biologists. J.
Clark Salyer was there. Salyer got up and made a speech about
that ‘you’ve got to open these areas to the public and let them
know what’s there. It’s the only way we’re going to have public
support’. Of course that was a great welcoming bit of words for
me. I was very happy over that.
MR. GROVER: You were separating the public visitor from the
hunter visitor?
MR. MARSHALL: The hunter visitor was okay on a hunting
area. But I’m talking about public visitors or hunters coming in
to see the birds in areas closed to hunting. Setting up a tour
route on a refuge just wasn’t done then. I wanted to, but most of
the old time managers were against it. Salyer helped change
that policy. I felt that the policy on refuge visitors needed to
change badly and it did get changed. Now in visiting the
Sacramento Refuge I take great pleasure in seeing a tour route
and visitor center.
Ekedahl would turn most important visitors over to me to
handle. This included Sir Peter Scott, Jean Delacour and Lady
Scott. Peter Scott and Delacour were two world known
waterfowl specialists, and Scott was also an artist. They came
to see Ross’ geese. I took them on a tour of the Grasslands in
the San Joaquin Valley, corresponded with Scott and wrote a
paper on the Pacific Flyway for the Wildfowl Trust’s
publication.
I never felt like I finished my work at Sacramento before the
transfer to Malheur came up, which I didn’t want to do. But
Ray Erickson was the biologist at Malheur. This was in 1955.
He was being transferred to the Washington Office. He was
bypassing the Regional Office and going straight to
Washington. He obviously picked me as his successor for
Malheur. John Scharff had a lot of faith in Ray. And Ray said
that I was the one. So I got transferred to Malheur.
MR. GROVER: Was this with a promotion?
MR. MARSHALL: I can’t remember. I knew you were going
to ask me that! I can’t remember if I got up to a GS-9 at that
point or not. I think I did maybe get to be a GS-9. I know that I
left Malheur as a GS-11.
MRS. GROVER: How big was your family by then?
MR. MARSHALL: We had two kids. Both children were born
in the hospital at Fallon, NV. They were fourteen months apart.
We had a boy and a girl.
Upon my transfer to Malheur one of the first things that came up
was a movement by a number of the merchants in the town of
Burns to try to get the Blitzen Valley portion of the refuge
turned back to private ownership. They threatened a bill in
Congress, and the local politicians were behind this. They were
determined that the Blitzen Valley would be much more
valuable by being turned back into private ranches. They had a
lot of power and support in Congress. I don’t think people
8
today realize how threatened some of these refuges were at that
point. There wasn’t the public support for them. Ray Erickson
had started a film on the refuge. And not being a bad
photographer myself, I worked some further on that film. But
then to try to put out a film on the refuge, strictly by amateurs in
this case, and try to explain the value of the refuge and what we
did was difficult. The camera equipment was also inadequate.
Fortunately, the issue died. That was one of my first jobs there.
Also at that point, Malheur Lake was down to 10,000 acres
because of a drought. We had a terrible problem with
introduced carp in the lake. The idea was to completely
eliminate carp from the Malheur Basin. It was a tremendously
big effort with an ex-Navy torpedo bomber being hired to spray
rotenone over the lake. All of the streams that lead to the lake
were rotenoned with drip stations. But about two hundred carp
could still be seen in the lake after it cleared up by the fall.
They were the survivors which made the operation only
temporarily successful. It didn’t matter what we did. We could
spray and spray and those carp remained alive. Of course it had
gotten cold by that time and the rotenone was not at as effective.
I don’t know if they had their nose stuck in a spring or what, but
I suspect that. So the carp project was highly successful to start
with. Then in the end it was a failure. You might have some
thoughts on that. But it was highly touted amongst the fishery
people what a great job they had done. And they showed
pictures of it at public gatherings. They had a fisheries
biologist/ photographer on the spot. But John Scharff, the
Refuge Manager, said, “You take pictures too”! Fortunately, I
did. I still see those photos being used. It did work for several
years and we had a tremendous return of sago pondweed, the
important duck food plant, to Malheur Lake once the water
came back and most of the carp were gone. A couple of years
later we had a real influx of terns and grebes which fed on carp
reproduction.
Malheur was another big experience for me. I loved the refuge,
but working with John Scharff was a challenge. Malheur was a
real one-man operation is the sense of ‘who was boss.’ And one
thing he would do with every new staff member was to take him
into his office and inform him that nobody was going to tell him
how to run the Malheur Refuge either from below or from
above. He would say, “If they don’t like it, they can fire me”!
But I had tremendous respect for John. He was the most skilled
administrator I ever worked for. He had been at the refuge….I
first met him there as a boy in 1939! He stayed there until he
retired at 70 in 1971.
Scharff was in many ways great to work for, but on the other
hand, you couldn’t recommend to him anything. You had to
kind of sit back and demonstrate things. He was frustrating to
me because he firmly believed in managing Malheur for
multiple uses like it was a national forest or BLM district,
including lots of grazing and haying. That was his thing. That
was his experience in the Forest Service. He was successful in
part because in part of the people he knew in Washington, D.C.
I can remember seeing him write a letter by hand one day that
started out with, “Dear Rufus”. He was writing to Rufus
Holman who was the Congressman for that area. And Chief
Justice Douglas of the Supreme Court would periodically show
up at the refuge without publicity, and was a guest at the Scharff
house. So were other Congressmen. The Regional office
couldn’t touch him! They could come out and make inspections
and say, ‘Do this, and do that and do the other thing.’ He’d say,
“Oh yes, yes”. But he’d never do them unless he wanted to.
The other thing he’d do when Washington office people came
out was to take them on a tour. Instead of going on the roads
he’d drive across the fields and meadows and through this gate
and that gate and around this circle and that circle and pretty
soon they had no idea where they were. He was very clever.
They would see a lot of wildlife and come back and say what a
great refuge Malheur is before departing. But seeing the money
and improvements going to projects like cattle watering troughs
was very frustrating to me. But now when I look back on it,
here was a refuge that could have been lost; but for Scharff
placating the cattle industry. I don’t know where we’d
otherwise be today. I think he was the right man in the right
place at the right time. Salyer sort of summed it up one day
when, upon arrival, he said, “well Scharff, you still running a
cattle ranch.”
I also need to credit John Scharff’s wife, Florence. She was a
great host. House guests were common place. Florence along
with John were gardeners. Refuge headquarters was a show-place
of flowers in the summer.
MR. GROVER: Was Scharff a biologist too?
MR. MARHSALL: No. He had a two-year degree in animal
husbandry from Oregon Agricultural College, which is now
Oregon State University. I do not mean to infer he did not know
wildlife. He did, and liked to play a game with me on which
one of us saw the first spring arrivals of various summer
resident birds.
MR. GROVER: They now have the bird festival out there in the
spring and it’s the John Scharff Festival.
MR. MARSHALL: Yep, it’s the John Scharff Waterfowl
Festival.
Well, the refuge is still there, and it’s not private land. Yes, and
in later years I began to appreciate Scharff more. When he
neared retirement I wrote a nomination for him to receive
Interior’s Distinguished Service Award. This was against the
advice of his regional office supervisor; but I did it anyway and
Scharff went back to Washington to receive the award in 1971.
He had the longest tenure of any refuge manager in the National
Wildlife Refuge System. His government service began with
the U.S. Forest Service in 1923.
MR. MARSHALL: I didn’t see the political side of it at all
when I was there. I was no politician and it was frustrating to
me when I could see that things could be done a lot better from
the wildlife perspective. Going back and looking at it now, I
saw the pendulum swing completely the other way with great
expanses of solid cattail and bulrushes, which in part the
livestock controlled. The pendulum swung too much the other
way after he left. So Scharff was a pro and a con as far as
9
working with him. I did a lot of photography while I was there
which he was very interested in having me do along with the
wildlife inventory work. He was afraid of the water. He
wouldn’t go out on Malheur Lake in the boat. The airboat on
the lake was really my domain. He had some kind of fear of the
water.
During my time at Malheur, public use of the refuge expanded;
yet there were no public use specialists. During the spring and
that thatearly summer months we were deluged with birders,
naturalists and photographers. Scharff liked to see influential
people personally conducted over the refuge – quite the opposite
of my experience at Sacramento. Scharff did a lot of that
himself, but much of it fell on me. Each weekend from March
through June, we hosted classes from colleges and universities
throughout the northwest. They stayed in the old CCC mess
hall, since torn down. I would conduct the classes on a tour of
the refuge on Saturdays and give them a slide presentation on
Friday or Saturday nights. There were no weekends off during
this period. I wanted to set up a tour route with numbered
stations that referred to a brochure, but Scharff would not have
any part of that. The public was free to roam the refuge at will,
although we often mapped out routes for them.
Eleanor Pruitt, the co-manager of the Frenchglen Hotel saw a
demand for an ornithology course for the local people. She
arranged for this through the state extension service. I
conducted the course which was for college credit and well
attended by some Harney County citizens, including school
teachers.
Another thing that came up at that point was that the local
people and the Corps of Engineers wanted to put a dam on the
Upper Silvies River. They wanted to dam the water behind the
Silvies River so in short water years, they’d have a more
dependable supply. Malheur Lake’s watershed alternates
between series of high and low water years. There was a lot of
push for this dam. Our division known at that time as River
Basin Studies came into the picture. They had me document the
heavy waterfowl use in the spring in the lower Silvies River
valley in the Burns area. We really showed its value to the
spring migration for waterfowl. I feel like that was quite an
accomplishment. The dam never got built. I was at Malheur for
five years. It was difficult from a family standpoint, very
difficult. I wanted to be transferred to the Regional Office and I
got that, finally.
MR. GROVER: Are you talking about being transferred to the
Portland office?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. It was real important for the sake of
my family, and I want to tell you why. The one room school
was inadequate and it was difficult to hire a qualified teacher.
Refuge housing was inadequate. Scharff wanted his biologist to
live on the refuge to be available when needed and to assist with
the visitor load. Even if we had moved to Burns, the road
between the refuge and Burns was unpaved and sometimes in
winter nearly impassable. The house had only two small
bedrooms and our boy and girl had grown old enough to need
separate rooms.
By the time I had moved to the Regional office, the refuge staff
there had grown somewhat. It was still Kenneth McDonald as
Refuge Supervisor plus several assistants who each took a
couple of states.
MR. GROVER: Are we talking about a promotion then? What
year was this?
MR. MARSHALL: This was in 1960. I think I was a GS-11.
There, I ran up against the same old problem of working with
somebody who wasn’t a biologist and really wasn’t oriented in
that way. I will just throw out one example that is here in my
notes. We had on the Red Rocks Lake Refuge of Montana,
graylings, which is a fish that there was some concern about.
They spawned there. Ken (Mac) McDonald was such a guy for
having everything just so neat and orderly and clean that he
insisted on turning a stream that had the Grayling into a straight
line ditch, because he wanted everything laid out in straight
lines. Those were the kinds of frustrations I had. Of course,
that was extremely detrimental to the grayling. He got into a big
hassle with the state fisheries biologist over it, too. But it was
very frustrating for me because at that time I really didn’t feel
like I was accomplishing a lot; others just didn’t think like I did.
At that time there was no public affairs officer in the regional
office. A lot of the public questions having anything to do with
wildlife continually got referred to me. Mac thought I should
become a Public Affairs Officer. That didn’t happen because
Montana Senator Mike Mansfield wanted to fill the job with a
man named Nick Mariana. Nick knew nothing about wildlife
and was a disaster for that position. I kept having to answer
many of his calls about wildlife.
I was in the Regional Office for probably two or three years and
was detailed to the Washington Office on an assignment. Mac
pulled me aside and said, “you know why you’re going there?”
I said I didn’t. He said, “They want to look at you relative to a
position there.” I told him I was glad he tipped me off. The
Washington Office was last place I wanted to go. I handled the
detail okay. But right from the start I let it be known that I was
not the least bit interested in a job in the Washington Office.
This made my friend Ray Erickson very unhappy with me. He
took me aside and he said, “Dave, you’re selfish! You’re just
thinking about yourself!” It made me feel bad, but I just didn’t
want to go to the Washington Office. Besides, we just had built
our first real home and inherited a cabin at Mt. Hood. My
present wife says that I really missed a bet. I don’t know if I did
or not. This would have been in the early 1960’s.
We got the loan on the Duck Stamp money and suddenly we
had a lot of money to buy new refuge lands with. This was a
very rewarding subject to me. We pulled in Leo Couch, who
had retired after serving as Chief of Research. He helped select
lands in the region for refuges. Leo and I worked together on
this. I particularly knew the Willamette Valley. In fact, this
subject came up while I was still at Malheur. A memo came out
from the Washington Office asking for recommendations for
new refuges that could be purchased with duck stamp funds. I
nominated sites which now constitute the William L. Finley and
Baskett Slough refuges in the Willamette Valley.
10
MR. GROVER: Was this part of your detail? Or was this after
the detail?
MR. MARSHALL: I don’t recall whether before or after.
MR. GROVER: So you’re back in Portland now.
MR. MARSHALL: I was only on detail for a couple of weeks
or three weeks. I can’t even remember what it was for. It must
have been not real important. So I was back and we had funds
to purchase new refuges. Even before the funds became
available, J.Clark Salyer came to the regional office.
Unbeknown to any of us, as a result of my recommendation, he
had looked over the Muddy Creek area which eventually got
incorporated into the William L. Finley Refuge. He would
travel the country and inspect areas and refuges by day and
travel at night. He was afraid to fly. He went into the Failing
Estate property at Muddy Creek one day, passing all of the
private land and no trespassing signs, and looked that area over.
He apparently got back out without being seen. When I saw
him in Portland, he said something to the effect of, “Dave, that’s
a great area, buy it!” Mac was sitting there. And of course Mac
thought the world of Salyer. Salyer’s word was god, so that
cinched the William L. Finley Refuge, at least the approval part
for the Service.
But Mac said we had to go see the principal owner who was
Henry Cabell. He was a grandson of Henry Failing, for which
the Failing building in downtown was named. Cabell had the
biggest key piece of area that would be part of the refuge. His
grandfather started it as a hunting reserve, and it was still used
for such. They had a house there that they used for hunting; he
and his friends. So we went to see Henry Cabell. Cabell was
very cordial and invited Mac and I into his office. We explained
to him what we wanted. He said, “No”. It had been in his
family for years and he just couldn’t give it up. I was very
discouraged and walked back out with Mac. Mac said, “No,
you just wait. I’ve seen this happen time and time again. We
want a new area, so we’ll go back and see him in another year or
two. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
Sure enough, we went back. He invited us in again and we sat
down with him. This time we had the Realty Specialist with us.
His name was Don Kistner. Henry Cabell said, “This land has
been in my family for years and my children don’t have any
interest in it. I want to see it remain a wildlife area. I think you
gentlemen have the only answer”. Then he said, “I know how
you people operate. I know you have a low price and a high
price. I don’t want either one. I want it to be right in the
middle”. He was a very public spirited man. We did our review
of the area’s value. He did his independently and they came out
the same in terms of overall value. I will always remember that.
There was no argument over price. After that we were able to
acquire McFadden’s Marsh and some other pieces.
There was a big public outcry against the acquisition of that
refuge and a big public meeting at Corvallis. The farmers were
all against it. The county agricultural extension agent led the
opposition. They were concerned about loss of tax money and
farm land in Benton County. That led to a bill in the State
Legislature which would make state approval for a refuge
conditional upon county approval. That would have killed these
refuges in the Willamette Valley.
MR. GROVER: That’s the same strategy that was used in the
Dakota wetlands, the prairie potholes. They had to have local
approval.
MR. MARSHALL: It passed the Legislature. Mark Hatfield
was then Governor and he vetoed it. He said he did not think it
was good government for local government to have veto power
over something that was favorable to the state as a whole. My
wife at the time was quite active in working to defeat that on
behalf of Portland Audubon. The Oregon Duck Hunters
Association also participated. They did lobby Hatfield after
loosing in the Legislature.
Three refuges eventually immerged in the Willamette Valley. I
scoured the Valley for other potential refuge areas. They
wanted to have five sites. That was part of the condition for
State approval. I had also recommended Baskett Slough. I’d
done a lot of work in college on the William L. Finley refuge
area. At Baskett Slough I used to drive by and see the geese
there. I recommended that and they wanted more areas so I
scoured the valley. One of the candidates I came up with
Ankeny. It was on the bottom of my list. But the engineering
people, because of the water at Ankeny, and a ditch going
through it; recommended Ankeny. So did the Realty people
because they thought the land would be cheaper there. I really
wanted to see a piece of land acquired along the Tualatin along
with Wapato Lake. That was my first choice after Baskett
Slough. It never came to pass. There wasn’t any goose use at
Ankeny, which was the main thrust for these areas. But I did
see the potential and I thought there could be significant goose
use. Maybe I was gambling but I felt with minimum wetland
development geese would use that area and it’s turned out to be
very successful. So I am happy about all three of those areas.
But along comes the General Accounting Office just after the
acquisition of these areas. And they said, “You’ve bought lands
that are not wetlands with Duck Stamp money. The testimony
before Congress by your Director was that you were going to
spend this money on wetlands.” We bought the Finley refuge,
which had a lot of upland with it. It was a marvelous, good,
varied type of habitat. And Baskett Slough had a butte on it.
They wanted to know why we didn’t exclude those. We
explained that the landowners said they would to sell all or
nothing. That was one of the questions we put to Henry Cabell
too. “Would you sell just the wetlands parts?” He had quite a
gleam in his eye and said, “I’ll sell all or nothing”! This pleased
me extremely. He was very public spirited and he saw the value
of the William Finley Refuge as kind of an outdoor laboratory
for students at Oregon State. I know that’s a lot of what was
behind it. Anyway, GAO came in and they had the big
investigation. Of course, I was the first line of defense on this
thing. I selected the areas and RD wasn’t happy with me
because of what I had done. Obviously he didn’t want a GAO
investigation. The irony of that is that the GAO head
investigator was a former buckaroo from the Roaring Springs
Ranch which had grazing/haying permits at Malheur. I knew
11
him there, after which he left the buckaroo business and went to
college and into the GAO. He was one of those people who
wanted the Blitzen Valley at Malheur to go back into private
ownership. I can’t remember his name. But the GAO had their
investigation and there was a big headline on the Oregonian that
FWS had misappropriated funds or something like that. Then,
Ira Gabrielson showed up. He wanted to look at this situation.
So Ray Glahn and I put him in our airplane, a Cessna 180 by
that time.
MR. GROVER: What position was Ira Gabrielson by this time?
MR. MARSHALL: He was President, or President Emeritus of
the Wildlife Management Institute. He had a lot of say, I can
assure you. I learned that quickly, after it got to Washington.
He didn’t really retire! Anyway, he showed up at the regional
office. We took him to the airport and strapped him into the
Cessna. We had heavy duty agricultural type shoulder and
seatbelts. He said he felt like we were putting him into a horse
collar. He didn’t have much time. We made an aerial tour of
the refuges in the Willamette Valley. I complained about the
GAO investigation. He kept saying, “To hell with ‘em! To hell
with ‘em!” I could tell he was very pleased with the three areas.
“To hell with ‘em. Don’t worry about it!” Then he returned to
Washington. I never heard a thing more about this issue. Years
later, I asked John Gottschalk about it. My close friend Fred
Evenden and I used to go birding with John on Sunday
mornings when I worked in Washington, D. C. I asked John
whatever happened to the GAO investigation of the Willamette
Valley refuges. He said that he was at a congressional hearing
headed by Julia Butler Hansen, who chaired the Interior
Appropriations Committee. She was from southern
Washington. She brought up the GAO investigation.
According to John Gottschalk, she said, “Mr. Gottschalk, what
are you going to do about this?” John said, “I told her;
absolutely nothing”! She looked kind of startled and said,
“Well, I guess that’s that”! I learned this years later. I don’t
know what role Gabe had in that thing but he obviously came
out for a reason.
Another thing that happened: I’d periodically go to the Willapa
Refuge with Ray Glahn. One day we flew down over the
islands in the lower Columbia River area. They are marshy
islands, which I didn’t know were there until the flight. You
couldn’t see them from the ground. I wondered who these
islands belonged to. Jim Shaw, who was the Realty Specialist,
then looked into it and found out that they belonged to the
county for back taxes. So Jim went to the County
Commissioners. They said the islands were of no value to them
and we could have them. That’s how easy you could do things
in those days! Yeah! So we acquired the Lewis and Clark
Refuge just as simple as that! The only stipulation was that they
remain open to hunting. We weren’t buying them, so we
weren’t under this restriction to have part of it closed to hunting.
Another thing that happened was that Bob Twist, who was
Manager at Willapa had flown the Oregon coast and taken a
number of good photographs showing the seabird colonies there.
Then, Ray Glahn and I started flying it. We saw that there was
a lot more to the offshore bird rocks than the existing Three
Arch Rocks and Goat Island refuges. So we inventoried the sea
birds on the offshore rocks and determined that they were still
public lands under BLM. We went to BLM and asked if we
could withdraw them. They said, “Fine, have at ‘em!” There
were no environmental impact statements; no public hearings
and they were transferred to FWS.
This is what frustrates me today with what the people have to go
through and put up with. That’s how we added all the larger
rocks to the Oregon Islands Refuge. There was nothing to that.
I learned about Ledbetter Point, now a part of the Willapa
Refuge; Ledbetter is an extension of the Long Beach peninsula.
It constituted accreted land. Sand had built up in that area over
the years so it was government, BLM land. From some of my
Audubon friends in Seattle, Washington, I learned about this
area and what a great area it was for brant and shore birds. So I
thought that we ought to get that into the Refuge System. We
ran into a roadblock, which was the State Parks Department.
They had their eyes on it. The RD and I went up and saw the
Parks Director. He had a grandiose plan to put a hotel on
Ledbetter Point plus campgrounds, riding stables and all kinds
of great things for public use. The Audubon Society in Seattle
got wind of that. And the Portland Audubon Society did too. I
led a joint field trip for the two Audubon groups to Ledbetter
Point. By working together we managed to beat the state out on
acquiring that area. But in so doing, I got virtually a reprimand
from the Regional Director. He was very, very unhappy with
me because he was going by a letter from the Secretary that said
we ought to get along with our sister State agencies. He wanted
to make things peaceful and let the state have the area, so they
could do what they wanted to with it.
MR. GROVER: Who was the RD at that time?
MR. MARSHALL: It was John Findlay.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s another story. There’s a lot of good
things about John Findlay. But he was very unhappy that I
created this stir by encouraging the Audubon groups to work the
political ropes to get that area into the Refuge System.
MR. GROVER: Were relations between the FWS and the State
generally good at this time?
MR. MARSHALL: They were better by that time. When John
Findlay and I went to see the State Parks Director, we also went
to see John Biggs the Director of the Washington [State] Game
Department. John Biggs said that he was with us, but he
couldn’t say anything [publicly].
MR. GROVER: Did you have good relations with Oregon too?
MR. MARSHALL: Fair, but it got better as time went on. So
anyway, we got Ledbetter Point. I got into trouble and then a
letter came from John Gottschalk complementing us on what
we’d accomplished. He also said, in effect, that sometimes
things work out fine when there is controversy. So I was, I felt,
exonerated at that point. Nothing more was said. Ledbetter
Point became part of the Williapa Refuge.
12
Alaska became part of the region at that point. I was sent to
Alaska a number of different times, more so than anybody else
in the Regional Office. It was kind of rough duty up there.
There was a lot of camping and most of the people in the office
didn’t want to do that. Two of the trips were to look at the
situation with Musk Ox in Alaska. That’s a long story, I don’t
know if I want to go into it. But it ended up with Musk Ox
being transplanted back to the wild in Alaska. It was very
interesting to be on the Artic Slope in the middle of winter. It
was a great experience.
Hawaii was a forgotten place. We had nobody in Hawaii. Dick
Griffith, in the 1960’s, finally got a contract with Hawaii Fish
and Game to oversee the Hawaiian Islands Refuge. It hadn’t
been visited by anybody in the FWS since 1923. So I was sent
out to review the situation in about 1963. The military was out
there tracking some of the first satellites and they had four of
five men camped on various islands in the Refuge. The state
was rightfully concerned because they were bringing in plant
propagules such as seeds in their gear which could get started
on the fragile islands . Examples included dandelions, potatoes,
onions, and who knows what else. The state had no influence
over the military so they said we should send somebody out to
look at the situation. Any type of duty like this seemed to go to
me, which made me happy. The Navy took us out to the refuge
with a LST and helicopter aboard. The Navy was servicing the
military people there too. I’ve got a lot of great pictures from
that trip. With two state biologists, I inventoried the wildlife on
a number of the islands. We camped out on Laysan Island for
five days. It was quite an adventure. I came back and
recommended that we put a FWS employee in Hawaii. We
selected Gene Kridler, who succeeded me a Malheur. He went
out there then as chief law enforcement officer, Refuge Manager
and everything else. Kridler did a tremendous job starting FWS
activities in Hawaii. Eventually more refuges in Hawaii came
about.
One thing that I know my bosses did not always appreciate was
my working with some of the conservation groups like the
Audubon Society. It was okay if they thought I was doing the
right thing, but sometimes they didn’t appreciate it, like on the
Willapa issue. As now, I worked a lot with Portland Audubon’s
board and conservation committee, which sought my biological
expertise. In fact I was on their Board during all of this time in
Portland. We got some things done by just going around the
FWS. Some of my bosses were not too happy about that. I
suppose some of that goes on now, I don’t know, but it got
things done. In 1972 I authored a small book published by the
Audubon Society of Portland. It was titled Familiar Birds of
Northwest Forests, Fields and Gardens, and came out in 1973.
At least 20,000 copies of the book were sold.
In the early 1960s, Fred Evenden, Executive Director of The
Wildlife Society, came to John McKeen, Director of the then
Oregon Game Commission. Dean Marriage of the Soil
Conservation Service and me were urging the formation of a
state chapter of The Wildlife Society. It hinged on the state
since they had by far the greatest number of members. John
turned the idea down, saying the state legislature would not go
for paying for meeting attendance. A few months later John
came up with the idea of classifying an annual state meeting of
the society a training conference for his biologists and
managers. A chapter was formed. John was the first President
and I was the second. This state chapter is now one of the most
active in the country. It helped bring state and federal biologists
together. I subsequently served as President of the Northwest
section of the Society.
During this period, the Forest Service proposed an interagency
committee to designate research natural areas on federal lands in
OR and WA. I was designated to represent FWS. We set up
several such areas on national wildlife refuges in the region,
including three at Finley Refuge. The National Park Service
declined to participate.
In the fall of 1971, I was invited to substitute for one term for
Stan Harris, a wildlife professor at Humboldt State College.
Stan was going on sabbatical and it was the policy of the college
to find someone who was active in our field to serve as a
replacement. The fact that I did not have a graduate degree did
not matter. I received permission to take leave from the FWS
during the spring term of 1972 to teach at Humboldt. I taught a
class in waterfowl management, conducted field trips for an
ornithology class and handled a seminar. It turned out to be a
very rewarding assignment.
I was of course in the regional office during the height of the
Job Corps program. When the Malheur job corps station closed,
Bob Russell, Ass’t Refuge Supervisor in charge of Oregon and
Washington refuges, was anxious to see it declared surplus so
properties used by the station could be declared surplus and
distributed as needed to other refuges. He also looked at the
facility as administrative “headache” and should be demolished.
I disputed that, having been well aware of the need for housing
and eating facilities for the numerous school and conservation
groups which visited Malheur. The lack of such facilities other
than the old CCC mess hall was a problem while I was there. I
gained support for my position from Eleanor Pruitt, former
manager of the Frenchglen Hotel, who fed many univerisity
groups their evening meals at virtually no cost. Eleanor had
since become librarian for Mt. Hood College. I went around my
good friend Bob Russell to the regional administrative officer,
Henry Beatkey. Henry was very education oriented and when
he found we could not turn the facility over to a university by
one manual, he looked in another which said it would be OK.
Thus the Malheur Field Station was born. It was managed by a
consortium of colleges and universities. But the station director
appointed by the consortium was a disaster for Malheur. He
was an extreme environmentalist who wrote Scared Cows at the
Public Trough. Locally we still have not overcome the public
relations problems he brought on. However, we can be proud of
the station’s role overall.
Also during this assignment, the Endangered Species
Preservation Act of 1966 and the subsequent Endangered
Species Conservation Act of 1969 were passed. John Aldrich, a
Service employee at the U.S. National Museum and world
famous ornithologist headed up the preparation of the
endangered bird species lists for these Acts. When it came to
western birds he relied in part on me so I had a part with the first
13
endangered species lists. What I am proud of is the fact that no
bird got listed which should not have been, despite a fact we did
not have all the information that would have been desirable
MR. MARSHALL: The next thing is my transfer to the
Washington office. I was getting to feeling like dead wood in
Refuges in the Regional Office. Apparently I wasn’t that
popular. I felt like the Regional Refuge Supervisor at that time
pushed me aside. I was told later he was jealous of my
knowledge of the region. So I had to do something. My
children were long out of high school by then and I did finally
agree to go to the Washington Office to work in the Office of
Endangered Species, a topic, which very much interested me. I
went to work under a man named Gene Ruhr whose boss was
Keith Schreiner. I thought a lot of both of them and. got along
very well. I started out as being responsible for listing birds and
mammals.
MR. GROVER: Had you been promoted again by this time?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, I got promoted to a GS-13. So I was
in the Office of Endangered Species. It was officially called the
Office of Endangered Species and Foreign Activities. There
was about a half a dozen of us. The pitch then was that the
Regional Offices weren’t competent to handle endangered
species. Endangered Species programs should be handled
strictly by Washington, which I disagreed with very much,
having come from a Regional Office. We were overwhelmed
with work. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed at
the beginning of my assignment. I tell you, the workload was
just way too much. All kinds of things didn’t get done that
should have been done. We just didn’t have the necessary
staffing.
MR. GROVER: Did you supervise staff?
MR. MARSHALL: No, Keith Schreiner was there to start with.
Gene Ruhr was in charge of domestic stuff. Then there was a
foreign activities chief. We had just about half a dozen
professionals in the office – all very capable people.
MR. GROVER: You weren’t divided organizationally with a
branch of listing and a branch of recovery for example?
MR. MARSHALL: Well, yes in a sense. I was in charge of
listing domestic birds and mammals at the Washington office to
start with. A representative of the timber industry visited me
about every week over the spotted owl. At this point I was in a
quandary over the owl. I felt that if preventative measures were
not taken it was going to have to be listed. Schreiner sent me
out to talk to BLM and Forest Service people in Portland. I
couldn’t get those people to listen at all. It was just like, “You
mean the spotted owl could stop the timber industry? To hell
with you”! That was the attitude. The Forest Service and BLM
biologists could see the light, but they couldn’t get through to
their bosses.
MR. GROVER: When was that Dave?
MR. MARSHALL: That would have been in 1974. I had this
dilemma. I really felt that this owl should be listed. But it was a
political decision partly. I knew that if we listed it, it would
probably mean the end of the Endangered Species Act at that
point. The timber industry was so strong. The other concern
was that I was afraid they could beat it because we still really
didn’t have enough biological information on the owl to make a
really ironclad case. So that disturbed me as much as anything.
I knew we just didn’t have the demographic information that we
needed to make a really good case. We also did not have data
on home range size. The spotted owl was an issue that I really
lost sleep over. What was the right thing to do?
They reorganized the Office of Endangered Species and then I
headed up the recovery operations. I became the staff officer
responsible for recovery. Schreiner and Ruhr came up with the
idea of recovery teams and recovery plans. So this meant
writing up guidelines for both. I subsequently went around the
country conducting workshops for federal, state and academic
people on how to prepare Recovery Plans. By that time the
office had grown with some very capable biologists.
MR. GROVER: Was there a focus at that time on a particular
species?
MR. MARSHALL: Of course we had trouble with what we
called the ‘glamour species’. Everybody wanted to spend our
money on bald eagles, wolves, the condor, the peregrine falcon
and the like. That was a constant problem. Bald eagles and
wolves in a way saved the Act as we got ridiculed for wanting to
list non game fishes, amphibians and some plants like the
furbish lousewort.
MRS. GROVER: And whooping cranes?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, whooping cranes were a big thing too.
We called them all ‘glamour species’. But wolves and the bald
eagle “saved the day.” The timber industry sponsored a bill in
Congress to exclude subspecies. That way we’d have to drop
the spotted owl because the listing of it would have been for
only the northern subspecies. Then it was pointed out that the
bald eagle, wolves and peregrine falcons at the time were listed
as subspecies. For example, the gray wolf was listed only in the
U.S. outside Alaska. I had frustrations with the Secretary’s
office. There was a guy in that office named Amos Eno. Have
you ever heard of him?
MR. GROVER: Oh yes.
MR. MARSHALL: He worked for Nat Reed , Interior’s
Assistant. Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. He was
Nat Reed’s right hand wildlife guy. Nat Reed and Dillon
Ripley, who was head of the Smithsonian, had lunch
periodically. I always knew when they had lunch because I’d
get a call from Amos. He’d say to put so and so, and so and so,
on a recovery team. They were usually people we knew. Some
of them were trouble makers and we knew they couldn’t work
with people. He would also say to get this or that species listed.
I’d get all of these instructions from Amos. Then I’d go to
Keith and ask him, “What am I going to do”? Keith would say,
14
“Just forget about it, it will die”! That’s exactly what would
happen…the next thing you know Amos was on to something
else. But it was kind of frustrating.
MRS. GROVER: When Amos was heading up the Fish &
Wildlife Foundation, when it began, I didn’t have good feelings
about the Foundation. I do now. But it took a long time to
make it feel good. I just felt that they were against us rather
than with us. They were supposed to be helping us.
.
MR. MARSHALL: I just didn’t get along with Amos. I was
also disappointed with a decision by Assistant Secretary Nat
Reed who reversed a decision by our office to list the California
sea otter. I maintained the population was stable and we had
higher priorities. When asked why he took this action, his
response was the he promised Margaret Owings we would list it.
Ms. Owings was a strong proponent for the California sea otter.
I also opposed the listing of the grizzly bear, feeling that the
states had it in hand.
When I went to the Washington Office, Keith Schreiner told me
that if I couldn’t take the Washington Office, eventually he
would try to get me back to Portland, assuming he still had a
position to do so. That was part of the condition of my
employment there. When I told him that I had had enough, he
would see if he could get me a job back in Portland. Well after
four or five years, I went to him and said that I had had enough.
He said, “Okay”. And he contacted Kahler Martinson. Kahler
by that time had become the Regional Director in Portland. He
had been Assistant Director for Migratory Bird Management in
Washington. I don’t know what went on there, but they said I
could go back to be in charge of Endangered Species in
Portland. I don’t know if the job was even advertised. I don’t
know how it was arranged. But I had the Washington office
experience that was required. Kahler wanted me, and Keith
wanted to see me in that job and that’s what happened. The
person who was handling it was Phil Lehenbauer. Phil was a
good friend of mine. In fact, he was the first Refuge Manager
for Finley NWR. I helped put him there. He worked under me
as a student trainee at Malheur. I thought the world of Phil, and
here I was kind of taking his job. But he knew that he wasn’t
going to get that job permanently because he didn’t have
Washington office experience. Phil accepted the situation, and
was really a deputy to me in a way. He handled all of the
administrative and budgetary stuff that I didn’t like handling. I
liked handling the policy stuff and the Section 7 consultations
and so forth. Phil and I were a real team and I had an excellent
working relationship with him. I also felt highly of the Regional
Director, Kahler Martinson and his deputy, Bill Meyer.
MR. GROVER: Can you clarify the layout of the organization
at this point?
MR. MARSHALL: The organization was that Endangered
Species was a separate entity. It was under the Assistant
Regional Director for Federal Aid, who was Ed Chamberlain.
So an Assistant Director had Federal Aid and Endangered
Species at that time. I’m glad you asked that because I know
it’s different now. We built up a staff comprised of Phil
Lehenbauer, a botanist, a recovery plan person, a section 7
person plus secretarial help. We had a good organization there
with Endangered Species. We probably had more Section 7
consultations than all of the other regions combined. I know we
did. We probably had as many listed species as all of the other
regions combined and yet we couldn’t get much relief from the
budget standpoint to do what needed to be done. Each RD was
interested in getting his share of the pie when it came to
dividing it up. There’s not a lot to say about that. There was no
such thing as HCPs at that point. We were mostly involved with
listings, recovery plans and Section 7 consultations.
MR. GROVER: Was the spotted owl listed by this time?
MR. MARSHALL: No, we looked at that again with the same
dilemma. It became pretty evident by the time I left that we
were going to have to list it, but then the Service turned it down.
I retired in 1981 from the FWS.
MR. GROVER: What about the condor? They had been listed
by that time.
MR. MARSHALL: Oh yes. It was brought in under the 1973
act.
MR. GROVER: And you were working on the recovery plan?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, and I did a lot with the condor in fact,
way before the Endangered Species Act. I went down and
looked at the condor situation because there was a proposed
dam that would affect the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. That was
way before the 1973 Act. When you really look back on it, we
were involved with endangered species issues from the time of
the National Bison Range early in the last century. People don’t
realize that. The Red Rocks Lake Refuge for trumpeter swans
too. J. Clark Salyer always used to say, “If it ever looks like
there is a species in danger, that’s our first priority.”
MR. GROVER: This was before the Act defined what an
endangered or threatened species was.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes! We realized our responsibility there.
There’s not a lot to say about my last few years in the Regional
Office. By that time, we had this complicated thing for
evaluating performance ratings that really bothered me. Setting
performance standards and performance ratings you’d sit down
with the most dedicated person and they would want to put more
things down to do for their year than they could possibly do.
Then you had to turn around and rate them on how much they
got done. I thought it was very unfair. I had to really pull some
people back on what expectations for themselves were, or they
would come out with a poor rating. That took so much
paperwork that it really bothered me. I was 55, and I had well
over thirty years of Federal service considering my time with
the Forest Service, Park Service and military.
So that’s when I quit…and I could see the Reagan
administration coming along so that’s the time I decided to bow
out, on my birthday. It was March 7, 1981. That was the end of
my FWS career. I was handicapped through a number of these
years in that my wife turned into a mental case, and refused
15
treatment. It was a terrible personal situation. I thought that
maybe things would be better if I was home with her, which
they weren’t. That was another factor.
MRS. GROVER: This was Betty?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. It was really sad when you’ve got a
loved one who just won’t admit that there is anything wrong. It
was really difficult. It was hard on me all of the time that I was
in Washington because of that. And it was hard on my children.
I didn’t realize how hard it was on them.
MRS. GROVER: So your family accompanied you when you
went to Washington?
MR. MARSHALL: Not the children, but she did. She actually
loved it. She really did. But she had a period where she
couldn’t do anything but sit in the bedroom. She maintained
there was nothing wrong with her. She has passed away now.
MRS. GROVER: Let’s talk about your two children for a
minute. You had a boy and a girl, born in Fallon, NV. What are
they doing now?
MR. MARSHALL: The boy is a professional outdoor
photographer. He is very successful in knowing what people
want in outdoor pictures and what he can sell. He’s also put out
four coffee table books. One is lying over there. They are state
books like the one that Ray Atkinson did for Oregon with the
same publisher. He’s done three Washington ones and an Idaho
one. He married in later years to a lady who had three teenage
sons. With my son, she had triplets that are two and a half years
old. So I have my first grandchildren, who are triplets! They
are a handful! They live in Wenatchee, Washington. He got
interested in photography at Malheur when he was a little boy.
And I got him a camera; a complicated one. He right away
learned how to use it and started taking pictures. Of course
there was a world of opportunity of things to photograph. He’s
quite a naturalist. He majored in Fisheries at OSU, but he ended
up as a professional photographer. He got a master’s at the
University of Idaho.
My daughter is a businessperson. By the time she was twenty,
she was co-owner of a bicycle shop in downtown Portland, right
at SW 12th and Morrison Streets. Now, she is in the
international banking business and lives just out of Hanover,
New Hampshire. She does consulting work on international
banking for big international banking firms where they want to
review practices of various foreign banks, particularly in third
world countries. She goes to those banks and sees what their
practices are and how they have to change in order to be loaned
money by the big banks. She also buys houses, fixes them up
and sells them.
Raising children at Sacramento and Malheur Refuges was a
mixed bag. This was when they were between 2 and 10 years
old. I already mentioned the sub-standard housing, school
problems and lack of other children for playmates; but there
were positives. FWS was at that time very family oriented. I
have reason to believe it came from the Gabrielson era. I was
free to take my family with me on field trips so long as it did not
mean extra government expense. Son John liked to go out on
Malheur Lake with me in the airboat, and daughter Janet
especially liked to go with me when I conducted field trips for
visitors, especially college classes. She got to be pretty good at
bird identification, and as soon as a group in a car caravan
recognized this she would be invited to ride in a car with some
of the students. When Ray Glahn flew in for aerial waterfowl
surveys, one or both of them would go along. It got to be such
common place with them that when asked if they wanted to go
on a flight, sometimes it would be yes and other times no. I
can’t imagine such occurrences now. Being at Malheur also
allowed us to have a horse for the children.
MRS. GROVER: Don’t you have a new wife now?
MR. MARSHALL: Oh yes. My wife, Georgia, is a former high
school sweetheart. She and I went together in high school.
After the death of my first wife, and the loss of Georgia’s
husband; we got married a year ago last August, 1999. I was
very close to her parents. Her maiden name is Leupold.
Leupold and Stevens Instruments in Beaverton is owned by her
family. They are still the owners of it. The company is well
known by hunters for the rifle scopes it manufactures.
I think I’ve pointed out that we had some top biologists in the
FWS at the upper levels; Ira Gabrielson and J. Clark Salyer are
two examples. But many of the people I was working under
early in my career were not trained professional biologists.
They were kind of jealous of people with college degrees. They
were more interested in seeing facility upkeep on refuges. They
were very interested in animal damage control. That was a big
thing along with law enforcement and eventually hatcheries.
But with the people I worked for in refuges, it was a lot more
important how a station looked…your performance rating was
based on whether you had the buildings painted and whether the
lawn was cut and the garden hose was coiled up. That’s how
your performance was rated in Kenneth MacDonald’s eyes. The
cleanliness of the windshields on the trucks was important too;
not how much you attracted in terms of wildlife. This was a
frustration to me at an early time. Engineering, as I said, was
very strong. The pitch was that if you got money to build more
dikes and water control structures you could stabilize water
levels. Non-professional people then were really the ones in
charge. The last thing they wanted was people with Ph.D.s it
seemed like, although Ray Erickson was an exception. They
were afraid Ph.D.s wouldn’t want to get out there and work at
all. So graduate degrees were not encouraged at all.
I mentioned the problems in getting anything in the way of
equipment that the biologists needed. All they thought we
needed was a pickup, a notebook and some binoculars. On the
plus side, I am so happy with the funding today, in the FWS.
People don’t realize how tough it was then. For example, the
Refuge Manager in Sacramento, who preceded Vernon Ekedahl,
wouldn’t let the employees use the refuge shop. He wouldn’t
even let them pump up the air in their car tires because he said
that was air pumped at government expense. They were
extremely tight in Refuges with money in those days. To go on
a trip, your per diem was looked at very closely. A lot of people
16
went on their own. The housing was horrible on Refuges. I see
a lot that has changed to the good, including salaries.
I remember when I was at the Sacramento Refuge some Civil
Service auditors came in. They went over my job and audited it.
I think I was a GS-7 then. According to their audit, I should
have been an “11”, because I was working in a field without any
immediate supervision. That was common. You’d have
Managers that were in charge of small refuges who were GS 5s.
We didn’t really see a change in this until the 1960s. J. Clark
Salyer, said one day, “Hold salaries down. That way we’ll only
get the most dedicated people!” That was his policy. In a way,
he had a point. He did get dedicated people. They helped make
up for low salaries some by charging very little for housing on
refuges, but this later caught up with the FWS when GSA
discovered housing was not being charged for at going rates.
MR. GROVER: What grade would a GS-5 then, be
comparable to today in your mind? Do you think it would be a
GS-11?
MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, yes.
MR. GROVER: GS-11 is defined as the full professional level,
in other words, with a Bachelor’s degree.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s what it was according to this audit.
But I was a GS-7.
MR. GROVER: But you hadn’t seen that yet?
MR. MARSHALL: I just learned that when the auditors
showed up. Of course, FWS didn’t do anything about it.
Money was so tight. I’ve seen tremendous change there.
Obviously, the downside of things I see going on today is all of
the regulatory hoops. As much as I like NEPA and the
principles behind it, I can’t help but see the insurmountable
amount of time involved with NEPA documents, public
hearings, and so forth. I gave the example of how easy it was to
acquire some of these refuges, like the Lewis and Clark Refuge,
when you didn’t have all of these roadblocks put in front of you.
I felt that morale was generally very high in the Refuge Division in
those early days, despite the low salaries and poor housing
conditions. We just had people who were really dedicated to what
we were doing. There was little thought given to the forty hour
week in the field. I mean, if you had to get up and run a waterfowl
brood count at five in the morning, you did. There wasn’t always
time off, and certainly no compensation for the extra time. There
was a lot of work to be done on weekends. On the other hand,
John Scharff’s philosophy was, ‘well, if you want to go fishing in
the middle of the day, go!’ He was always running into a problem
when the auditors would come down from Portland. He liked to
tell the story about one of his maintenance men. He and the
auditor went were out on the refuge around noon and found one of
the maintenance men fishing. The auditor said, “He shouldn’t be
here, he’s supposed to be working!” So John asked the man, “Joe
what time did you get up this morning?” Joe answered, “Five
o’clock.” Then he asked him what he did at that hour, and Joe ran
off a bunch of details involving taking care of refuge horses and
irrigating fields. The auditor got the point.
MR. GROVER: Earlier you said that you focused in on the
USFWS. Why not the Park Service, the Forest Service or the
state?
MR. MARSHALL: I had done work for the Forest Service in the
Fremont National Forest. They had maybe one biologist during
my last year. There just weren’t the opportunities there in terms of
jobs at that time. I didn’t see in the Forest Service where I’d have
much opportunity.
With respect to going into the Park Service’s Naturalist Program, I
had worked for Crater Lake NP one summer. I found that they
were a terrible bureaucracy next to the Forest Service. They were
very bureaucratic. I even had to sign my name to check a shovel
out of the supply house! That was clear back in 1948. I didn’t
like the looks of that at all. And really, the FWS was doing the
things that I was most interested in. With the state fish and
wildlife agencies; when I went to work at Stillwater, I got
acquainted with a number of state people in Nevada. I found out
that the Director of Nevada Fish and Game was going to hire me,
but the FWS offered me a position first. So that’s how I ended up,
but I could have gone with the State of Nevada at the time.
MRS. GROVER:. Don’t forget to tell about your musk ox story!
MR. GROVER: Lets change gears a bit. I would like to get some
of your career story’s and reminiscences. How about starting off
with some memories? What about the cranes?
MR. MARSHALL: When I was in Washington, the President at
the time was first Nixon and then Ford. During Ford’s service, the
Emperor of Japan paid a State visit to the U.S. Of course, I didn’t
get to see the Emperor but people in the National Aquarium did.
They were very impressed with him because he was a Marine
Biologist. He brought with him, as a State gift to the U. S., a
bunch of exotic carp that are popular in Japan. They were going
to be put at the National Aquarium. It was a big collection of all
kinds of exotic carp. So this meant that President Ford had to give
a gift in return. Knowing that cranes are revered in Japan, a
decision was made by the Washington office to donate to the
Emperor, a pair of sandhill cranes from North America.
Hal O’Connor was selected to do the honor of taking those cranes
to Japan. For some reason, he couldn’t go and I was picked at the
last minute to take the cranes to Japan. I got them from Ray
Erickson out at Patuxent. Ray gave me instructions. He said
they’ll be fine just as long as they don’t get overheated. We had to
get all of the government passports and other papers in just a
matter of hours. Wayne Bohl was in the Washington office and
did a lot of foreign activities. He knew how to go through
Customs and get me all of the stuff I needed instantly. Otherwise,
they said it would have taken several days. The next thing I knew
I was at the airport with two sandhill cranes in crates. I got on a
Northwest Airlines plane, and the cranes were in the hold. I made
sure that the temperature was right. They kept assuring me that it
was okay. We left Washington, D.C. The crew had been given
instructions about why I was along and what an important mission
17
I was on. They were told, ‘Whatever you do, don’t foul up again!’
It turned out that the airline had transported the carp and about
half of them died because they messed up by not giving them
proper oxygen or something. Anyway, when we got to Chicago
everything was fine. I checked on the cranes and went on to
Anchorage. The airline people kept saying, “Well, I hope you
make it okay.” I thought to myself that something was screwy.
When we got to Anchorage, they announced that we couldn’t fly
on to Tokyo. The aircraft didn’t have the duel radios for over-water
travel. One of them was broken. They knew that in
Washington, D. C. They knew it in Chicago. They were passing
the buck to Anchorage to fix it. So my thoughts of Northwest
went down right then. I thought, ‘what am I going to do? I’ve got
these cranes here!”
MR. GROVER: Rent a motel room!
MRS. GROVER: For two cranes!
MR. MARSHALL: The hotel rooms in Anchorage were nearly
filled up. I got stuck in a room with somebody that I didn’t even
know. I said, “What are we going to do with the cranes?! The
airline told me they could put them in the Pilot’s Lounge and give
me the key. About two in the morning, I woke up and wondered
what the temperature was in that Pilot’s Lounge. I neglected to
check it. Ray told me, “Whatever you do, don’t let them get too
warm”. So I got a taxi and went out to the Pilot’s Lounge and
found the cranes were fine. They knew me by then, and
everything looked good.
So twenty-four hours later we checked in on to the next flight in to
Tokyo. The Japanese were rather put out that we were twenty-four
hours late. But it was an interesting trip. Northwest put me
in first class, even though my ticket wasn’t for that. The ground
crew opened the door of the plane in Tokyo, and the guy says,
“We want man with cranes first!” I heard him say that because I
was in first class, right by the door. So they put me off on the
tarmac and they were supposed to leave those cranes alone until I
got there. But they had already moved them from the hold. This
was kind of worrisome to me. What if those cranes were to die?
But it turned out they were fine. And they put them in a police
paddy wagon. They had a police escort for the cranes.
The Ambassador’s representative met me in an American made
car and we went through the streets of Tokyo with this entourage
of police motorcycles and the cranes. We took them to the Zoo.
Then of course they said, “We know you must be tired, but we
want to have a press conference”. The Japanese being what they
are; the first thing they asked me was, “How old are you”? The
second question was, “How many years have you worked for the
FWS”? The State Department had given me a special title. It was
really a high title. It wasn’t real! It was an interesting experience.
The Public Affairs office in Washington made a real boo boo.
They named the cranes “Martha” and “George.” This just didn’t
go over with the Japanese at all!
It was kind of up to me as to how long I stayed because they
provided a guide for me, an assistant from the Zoo. They were
going to wine and dine me and take me sightseeing for just as long
as I stayed there. It was up to the Ambassador to formerly donate
the cranes to the Emperor. He was going to do that after they were
out of quarantine. It was a fun trip.
MR. GROVER: But the bottom line is; were they okay when you
left Japan? Good old, tough Sand Hills.
MR. MARSHALL: They were okay. I never heard anything
more about the cranes! I did my job!
MR. GROVER: Did you get to fly back first class?
MR. MARSHALL: I don’t remember. I think I did. It was
Christmas time and I flew back to Portland. The family came out
too.
MR. GROVER: Let’s talk about your photography. You were
showing me one of your books, Wild Sanctuaries. There are a
number of others like, Birds in Our Lives and what else?
MR. MARSHALL: And Waterfowl Tomorrow. The later two are
both USFWS publications.
MR. GROVER: And these are pictures that you took when you
were working for FWS?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. Those books are around here. I
continually had a call for photographs. I never got any money for
them because the FWS manual said there were questions about
whose time were taken on – my time versus Service time.
Furthermore, they argued that the pictures were taken because of
my knowledge that I had gained out of the FWS. So, I never got a
dime for photographs.
MRS. GROVER: Tell us about the Musk Ox.
MR. MARSHALL: Okay, the Musk Ox in Alaska. Going back
into history; in the 1930s the FWS imported some Musk Oxen
from Greenland. They had become extirpated in Alaska. So they
picked some up in Greenland. They were transported all the way
to Fairbanks where they raised them on a kind of a farm. Well,
the money ran out and the musk oxen were barged over to
Nunivak Island. I asked Gabrielson about it years later and he said
that they just didn’t know what else to do. They didn’t have the
money to handle and take care of them so they dumped them off
on that island which is out in the Bering Sea.
Those musk oxen grew to a herd of about six or seven hundred.
Nunivak Island was not their natural habitat. Their natural habitat
is a dry, desert like Arctic climate with very little snow. This
island had heavy snowfall something like the Pacific Northwest
Cascades. The only forage the musk oxen had during the winter
was in a dune area where the snow would blow off and expose the
grass. The oxen were over eating their range. There were too
many of them for the amount of winter forage that was available.
The FWS proposed a hunting season on them. All hell broke
loose then about the idea that it would be just as easy as going out
and shooting a cow; which is about right. Governor Wally Hickel
was in on that too. He was totally against it because the public
was against it.
18
We had a real problem of how to handle the musk oxen. What we
wanted to do was to be able to move a bunch of them to the Arctic
Slope and other areas where they were originally present in Alaska
before extirpation. But moving animals of that weight would be
tremendously costly. There was no money to accomplish this and
it turned into a public relations issue. I think John Gottschalk and
I know John Findlay were involved; they contacted the Director of
the Canadian Wildlife Service, John Tenner, to advise us on the
situation. John Tenner, it turned out, did his thesis on the musk
ox. Even though he was the Director of the Canadian Wildlife
Service he wanted to go on this trip himself. There was an
entourage then of John Tenner, myself and the Refuge Staff. We
toured Nunivak Island, which is about fifty by sixty miles with an
Eskimo guide. We toured partly by boat. We looked at the range
conditions. John Tenner said that he wanted to look at it in the
winter. He also wanted to see the area that was proposed for them
to be transplanted to. We went back in the winter, and went up to
the Arctic Slope. We saw conditions there, which according to
John Tenner, were very favorable for musk oxen. There were
none there of course.
Then we went back to Nunivak Island and looked at it under
winter conditions. We went all over the island using snowmobiles
and camped out with an Eskimo guide. He was a tremendous
guide. He was wonderful. They are great people, those Eskimos.
They found out it was my birthday and they baked a cake for me!
By then the issue had gotten big enough that the money did come
forth to do a transplant. I don’t remember if it was a special
appropriation or if Hickel got it, but National Guard aircraft were
used. They got the money to transplant a bunch of the musk oxen
from Nunivak Island to the Arctic Slope up near Nome. It was a
successful endeavor although it could have been done a lot easier
without all of the PR expense. So that’s the musk ox story.
After I retired from FWS, I wanted to work with my hands for
about a year and rebuilt part of the house. But then, I started
doing contract work. I was disturbed by the non-game program of
the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODF&W). It was
aimless. Somebody could issue a proposal, get a positive
response, and there were no objectives. I complained about this
and said that I’d like to write up a plan. The proposal didn’t go
anywhere for awhile. Finally, I spoke to Phil Snyder about it. He
had been one of the Commissioners for a long time. I told him
about the problem as I saw it. The next thing I knew the ODFW
Deputy Director called me in and told me that they wanted to go
ahead with drawing up a non-game plan. This was months later.
They said, “We want to prepare a set of goals and objectives and a
strategic plan” for the non-game program of Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife.
I did this and it was presented as a paper at the North American
National Wildlife Conference as the first of it’s kind. Later, we
updated it. I did status reports on potentially endangered or
threatened species. I did these partly for the Audubon Society of
Portland. One of them was on the Marbled Murrelet. Audubon
used it as a basis for the petition to list the Marbled Murrelet as a
threatened species, which did come about. I was pretty much
responsible for ODFW’s Species at Risk and all of their write-ups
on endangered species. I also did some work for commercial
firms; writing part of EISs on some projects like highway
widening and so forth. But the satisfaction really came from
doing contract work for the Audubon Society of Portland and
ODFW. I also taught an introductory course in wildlife
management at Portland State University for two terms. It filled
each time offered and at least two of my students became
professionals in the field.
Subsequently, I had a major health problem, which is why I’m so
short now; or shorter than I was. When I saw that I was going to
be okay, I started to work on this, Birds of Oregon: A General
Reference. I have been working on it for a couple of years now.
MR. GROVER: Did you intend that this book be a kind of follow
up to what Gabrielson did back in 1940?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. I kind of had it in the back of my mind,
starting back in 1940. I thought to myself, “This is going to have
to be redone some day”. I would have liked to have done it much
sooner, but there was never an opportunity where I could afford
the time and money to do it. This is a project that I have wanted to
do for a good part of my life.
MR. GROVER: The topic of Ira Gabrielson?
MR. MARSHALL: My contact with Ira Gabrielson started when I
was a baby in arms according to my father. I don’t remember him
as a child. But as history shows, he was Regional Director here,
for FWS or the Bureau of Biological Survey, I should say. At that
time most of the BBS work was devoted to predatory animal and
rodent control, refuges, and some research type activities. “Gabe”
was RD and prior to that he was in charge of rodent control.
Stanley Jewett was in charge of predatory animal control. Their
salaries weren’t much in those days, and Gabe was very much
interested in alpine plants. He put out a book, Alpine Flowers, and
he also had a nursery out near Powell Butte, which I have a
brochure for here somewhere. Here, he raised alpine plants for
gardens as kind of a sideline to supplement his meager salary. He
made his mark as being an excellent Regional Director. A lot of
this is in his memoirs. Ding Darling was of course the Director
appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. They brought Gabrielson back
to the Washington Office on a detail, so they said. But the detail
went on and on. Ding Darling called him in one day and
instructed him to report to his office. Gabe said he got there and
Ding Darling said, we’re going to see Harold Ickes”! Gabe said,
“I didn’t know what it was about!” He said that they went in there
and Ding Darling said that he wanted Gabe to be his successor.
“He knows all about this stuff, I don’t”. Gabe said that he was
speechless. He finally consented. Gabe told me how he regretted
the way things are done now. He said that Ickes told him that he
[Ickes] didn’t know anything about the fish and wildlife business
and that he wanted him to ‘just take care of it’. He said that if he
was to run into any problems to let him know, “but otherwise, it’s
yours”!
Gabe told me that there was no Assistant Secretary to deal with. If
he had to deal with anybody, he just went straight to Harold Ickes.
And he was free to deal with Congressmen. He said it was his to
run, and he just couldn’t get over the way it was when I was back
there. Our Director had to talk to the Assistant Secretary’s staff
19
and up through the Deputy Secretary and so forth. That’s what he
regretted most in terms of what has happened to FWS.
I really didn’t know Gabe as a child because he got transferred
out. He was active in the Audubon Society of Portland. I never
heard or saw much of him at all until he came to Malheur on some
kind of a visit. I told him who I was; Earl Marshall’s son. He
knew all about me, and he knew all about being friends with my
Dad. Then I didn’t run into him again until the GAO thing on the
Willamette Valley refuges. So again, I met him. Then when I got
accepted for the job in Washington, DC, he found out about it.
And like I said, I don’t know how he found out. That’s when he
made the phone call. But I remember one of my favorite things he
said to me when I got there; he was talking about the Presidential
election for Nixon. Maybe it’s out of turn to tell this because he
tried to be as non-partisan as possible. But he said, “It’s a hell of a
choice we had this time! We could vote for a crook, or a man that
didn’t have the executive ability to put together a wheel barrow
crew!” He was speaking of Nixon and McGovern.
He told me one day, “I knew all of the recent Presidents. I knew
Roosevelt real well. I knew Truman, and Eisenhower”. He went
on up the line to Nixon. He called him a ‘crook’ long before
Watergate. He said, “There’s only one of them that grew and that
was Truman. All of the rest of them just swelled”! Those are two
of the things I’ll always remember that Gabe told me. He seemed
to have a sense of what was going on all of the time. Watergate
was just starting to surface in the papers. He told me, “You just
wait! This is just the tip of the iceberg of what went on”! Sure
enough! I don’t know how he knew those things. He would go
into D.C. to the Cosmos Club, which he was a member of.
He gave me a lot of good advice. And living right near him for a
year and a half or so, I really got to know him. He didn’t want me
to knock on the door any more. It was too much trouble to get up.
But just hearing him tell about things in the political world and
how the Federal Aid Act got started and how they arrested Walter
P. Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation for a violation of the duck
hunting rules was interesting. Of course Chrysler appealed to
Roosevelt and Roosevelt backed Gabe up. He told me that this
was the beginning of game laws really meaning something. They
were no longer a joke. He sure kept up with things right up ‘til the
end.
MR. GROVER: Didn’t you tell me that he didn’t sleep much?
MR. MARSHALL: Oh yeah, that’s another part of the story. I
am glad you mentioned that, because he didn’t sleep much. He
was such a dynamic man and especially since he was heavy. He
was so energetic. But he liked to write. In his tours around the
country he only needed three or four hours of sleep a night, so
he’d write stories in hotel rooms. He had stories in all kinds of
sporting magazines that he wrote when he was Director, under a
pen name. The pen name was Spear, his wife’s maiden name. He
wrote hunting and fishing stories for magazines like Sports Afield
under this pen name. He also wrote a garden column for one of
the depression era magazines. He was a great gardener. He wrote
that under the pen name, “A. Amateur Farmer”. He had quite a
sense of humor and they were all humorous stories about what was
happening in his garden and how he got bit by the bees or one
thing and another. The bees got up his pants leg. Another one of
them was how a neighbor sold him some sting-less bees, and of
course how he found out that they weren’t sting-less. It was just
humor all of the time. When he was here in Portland he wrote for
the Oregon Motorist. One of the titles was “A Fat Man Climbs
Mount Hood”. He was a prolific writer, but so much of it wasn’t
under his real name. When he died, that stuff was in the house.
His nephew or grandson told me that this stuff had disappeared.
We don’t know what happened to it. His wife kept a scrapbook of
all of the things he wrote. These stories are not listed in his official
bibliography because he didn’t want it known that he wrote them.
MR. GROVER: But you have a copy of his diary?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, his memoirs, which were taken from his
diary. He excerpted his diary to write these things. This is what it
looks like. [Marshall shows Mr. Grover the book].
MR. GROVER: It’s fairly thick and one of those legal sized….
MR. MARSHALL: Well, it’s legal sized with reduced type. Two
8.5x11 pages typed double spaced are reproduced on legal sized
paper as two columns. There is one of those on deposit at the
Gabrielson Library at Patuxent. So I made them aware of that.
MR. GROVER: You have the only other one?
MR. MARSHALL: Well, I think maybe his family has another.
The Wildlife Management Institute has one also, I suspect.
Milt Reeves and I wrote a piece on him that was in published in
The Auk. I think I have a copy it around here somewhere. But
that’s about all I have to say on Gabrielson. There’s no use
duplicating what’s in his memoirs. A lot of it is in there; except
for a description of his personality; he had a great sense of humor
and tremendous energy. Oh, there it is! Shrubs, Bulbs, Alpines,
and Rare Native Pants in Oregon Gardens. This is the flyer from
his business, from 1937.
MR. GROVER: That was his old sideline to supplement his
meager Regional Director’s pay.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes! I think Tom McAllister had the original
of that. That’s kind of a little interesting piece about him.
Ira Gabrielson told me one day that they wanted to have a chief of
the Wildlife Refuge System and they had picked the “best damned
aquatic biologist they could find”! It was J. Clark Salyer. Salyer
was shaped something like a pear. He was huge. And he always
ordered two meals at a restaurant; two helpings, not just one. But
he was also diabetic and ignored it. And he had tremendous
energy. He was a blonde, big guy, like I said. He didn’t like to
fly. So he would drive all over the country in his big black
government Buick. He would drive at night and visit refuges and
potential refuges during the day. They told me to do this too. I
could tell about that. That was his routine. He thought nothing of
testifying before Congress. He would completely bypass the
Director. They’d call him to testify on something, or he’d arrange
it so they’d call him. He was just a tremendous person in terms of
promoting refuges.
20
He was extremely knowledgeable and to me his mind was just like
a photograph. He wouldn’t forget where he had been and could
describe things in detail. He had this tremendous energy.
McDonald thought the world of him although Salyer didn’t think
that much of Mac. I know this because Mac was so fastidious. I
have to tell a story about the personalities of Kenneth McDonald
and Salyer. The Manager at the Charles M. Russell Wildlife
Range in Montana was a very fastidious guy too. This could be a
very dusty place. The Refuge Manager and Salyer were using
McDonald’s car. Salyer found out it was McDonald’s car and he
told the Refuge Manager, “That gives me an idea”! He hung
sagebrush from it and got it as dirty as he could possibly get it.
And the Refuge Manager kept saying, “I don’t think this is a good
idea, Mr. Salyer”! But it showed the personalities of the two. Of
course they took Mac’s car back all dirty and covered with dust.
Salyer was always kind of knocking him down for that.
Salyer just had such tremendous knowledge about the refuges and
a grasp of everything on them. He could remember the smallest of
details. He embarrassed me one day back in Washington. He
started asking me about whether or not the spike rush was still
growing on a certain unit on the Sutter Refuge in California. I
didn’t remember whether it was still there or not. It was
embarrassing, the things he would ask about; little details about
something on a given refuge.
One of my last experiences in the field with him was when he
wanted to look at Deer Island. It is on the lower Columbia here,
near St. Helen’s. He had always thought about it as a refuge. He
was here for a meeting and he said, “I want to go look at Deer
Island”. They sent me and Howard Sergeant, the head of the
Realty Division to go with him. We got to the road, it was a little
narrow road, that goes into the island across a dike. There was a
big sign, “No Trespassing-Private Property”. We went in there
anyway, being Salyer. We looked Deer Island over. And we ran
into a man who I found out later was the owner. I subsequently
got to know the owner’s son. When we ran into this guy, of
course he wanted to know what we were doing there. Salyer said,
“We’re looking at the dikes. We’re from the Corps of Engineers
and we’re checking the dikes down here!” That was fine with the
owner of course. Then Salyer said to the guy standing there,
“Well boys, we’d better get back to Astoria.”
We were no more going to Astoria than we were going to Berlin!
But he could lie himself out of the pickles that he’d get himself
into! He told me one day, “My personnel folder is full of
reprimands and it will hold a whole lot more!” He was quite a
character. It’s too bad that he died at quite an early age from not
taking care of his diabetes. He became blind. He’d go around the
Interior Building with a map tube for a cane because he didn’t like
to admit he was blind. It was kind of sad. I’m not sure what
happened, but one day, when I was back there on a detail,
something had happened in the Director’s office, which related to
a political decision. Salyer came marching into the office I was in
saying, “Isn’t this a pissy ass outfit? It doesn’t have the guts of a
drunken cockroach!” I really enjoyed that man, and knowing
him.
MR. GROVER: Whom else do you think we should be
interviewing?
MR. MARSHALL: Well certainly Ray Erickson, who lives in
Salem. And he’s in his eighties. He needs to be interviewed.
MR. GROVER: You mentioned Kahler.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, Kahler Martinson. Erickson’s not in
Portland Retiree’s Directory. He left Region 1 in 1955. I didn’t
see his name in there.
MRS. GROVER: That’s not a name I remember. You were
talking about Vernon Ekedahl and Ray Glahn.
MR. GROVER: And there’s Gene Kridler.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, Gene is on your list. Here’s Ray
Erickson’s address and phone number. Ekedahl ended up as
Supervisor of Refuges here following Mac Donald’s retirement.
He was one of those guys who had no education beyond high
school. I worked under him on the Sacramento Refuge initially.
He’s in his nineties. His address is here. I correspond with him a
little. I do have his son’s email address too. I don’t know if it
would be worthwhile to talk to him. He’s getting forgetful…he
loves to talk about old times and he is so disapproving of anything
in the FWS now, because they are not doing it the way they did it
in ‘the good old days’. ‘They’ve got all of these people standing
around with nothing to do!’ He goes to Sacramento Refuge. He
stops there and lectures the guys on all of the things they’re doing
wrong, and about how they are not getting any rice planted or
doing any work. Every time I talk to Vernon, or he writes me a
letter, that’s what I hear. So I don’t know. He worked in refuges
in Montana in the late 1930’s and 1940’s in World War II. He has
moved to be with his son in Colorado.
There is also Phil Lahenbauer.
MR. GROVER: Was he a Refuge type?
MR. MARSHALL: He was in Endangered Species and Refuges.
Then there is friend, Dave Lenhart, who was in Pesticides.
MRS. GROVER: Yeah, Dave and Judy are pretty regular at the
luncheon things.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, at the last ones I went to. You might
consider Milt Reeves. He never worked in this region but he lives
out here now out at Amity.
MR. GROVER: Is he growing grapes or something?
MR. MARSHALL: No, he is making furniture out of chestnut.
Milt and his wife are very active in local political matters. He’s a
friend of Larry DeBates. He lives within a half a mile of Larry. I
think he would be worth talking to. Bob Russell is up there at
Sequim. I understand he is in poor health now. He went in to
refuges just before I did.
MR. GROVER: I want to thank you Dave, for y